by Robert G. Retana

​The card was made of white construction paper and had a small flower on the front drawn with crayons. Each petal was a different color, and “Happy Mother’s Day” was neatly written across the top of the card. The handwriting was that of a child but neat and precise, nonetheless. Inside the card, the words “from Victor” were written in blue ink. Victor brought it home from school right before Mother’s Day and showed it to his Aunt Dolores.
 
“Can I send this to my mother?” he said.
 
His words pierced Dolores’s heart because she knew how much pain this poor child carried around and how much he would suffer for the rest of his life for things he had no part in.
 
“Yes, you can send it to her,” Dolores responded. “We’ll find an envelope for it and mail it tomorrow morning. She should get it in a few days.”
 
“When can I see her?” Victor asked.
 
“We can go for a visit soon. But she is in Chowchilla, a long way from here, and I don’t know how soon we can take a trip there.”
 
“When can she come home?”
 
“Baby, she might never come home,” Dolores responded. “But she thinks of you every day, and you can visit her there. It’s far, and we can’t go that often to see her. My car gives me a lot of trouble, and it takes forever if we take the bus.” Dolores hugged him, and he hugged her back. Then he went upstairs to change his clothes and play video games before he had to do his homework.
 
Dolores wondered whether she would have it in her to heal this child’s heart or whether the pain he felt would become rage, and he would wind up in prison like his mother. She prayed he would not change and that God would help her know what to do to make things better. Dolores had her own two children and never expected to raise a third. But now that he was hers, she could not help but want to take care of him. No one should start off in life with so much pain and sadness.
 
She looked at the framed picture of herself and Marisa, her younger sister, and Victor’s mother, which she kept on the living room wall. It was taken when they were little girls, four and five years old. They were clinging to their mother, who looked so happy and beautiful. She had long, brown, wavy hair and large expressive eyes, just like Marisa. Both girls were smiling and holding on to their mother for dear life. Behind them stood their father, a tall, handsome, nicely dressed man with thick black hair combed back and a neat mustache that framed his broad smile. Little did they know that soon after this picture was taken, their father would leave home and never return.  
 
People said he had another family in Mexico and decided to return there. Others said he was spotted wearing a fancy suit in the bars with a new woman by his side. Whatever the story was, they never saw or heard from him again. It was too much for their mother to take, and soon after he disappeared, she killed herself, overdosing on sleeping pills.
 
Marisa was sent to live with her grandmother, who was too old to control her, and just prayed a lot for her salvation. Dolores went to live with an aunt who took good care of her but could not afford to take them both. The girls cried for weeks when they were separated. Although they kept in close contact, they went their separate ways in terms of lifestyle. Marisa always had boys chasing her, but she never found a healthy relationship. Men just brought her more problems. Dolores was more serious and had a stricter parental figure in her aunt. She could not run with the same crowd or tag along when Marisa skipped school or got a fake I.D. to go nightclubbing even though she was underage. Marisa quickly learned that any shyness or awkwardness she felt would go away when she had been drinking and doing drugs, and her self-esteem was boosted by the attention she got from men, even if it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. There was always room at the parties for a pretty girl who liked to have a good time.
 
The pain of losing their mother and father and then being separated from Dolores never seemed to lessen for Marisa. She lied, made everything seem great, and gave Dolores expensive gifts and clothes that she could not afford to buy for herself, never explaining how she got them. Marisa could never look her sister in the eye and tell her everything she was caught up in. People said she used men and women to get what she wanted. Marisa would always drive nice cars but never had a job that would allow her to afford them. She dressed in nice, new clothes and always had her hair and nails done. She looked vivacious, but when she drank, the sadness in her eyes was unmistakable.
 
When she visited Dolores, she sometimes slurred her words like she was high but denied she had a drug problem. Dolores begged her not to use drugs when she became pregnant and feared the baby would be born with birth defects. Luckily, he was born a healthy baby boy. Marisa never said who the father was and gave the baby her last name. She named him Victor, after their father, which surprised Dolores since Marisa always said she hated him. “At least this Victor will never leave me,” Marisa explained. “He will always be mine.”
 
Marisa cared for Victor as a baby, but as soon as he could walk, she started partying again. She would leave him with friends and family as often as she could. She would ask Dolores to watch him for a few hours and then not pick him up for a week. Marisa’s heart was not right, and having a baby did not change that. She always showed up with money, a nice toy for Victor, and a long story. Dolores knew Marisa was headed for trouble; however, she never imagined how much trouble was ahead.

***

​The drive home that night began in the Mission District of San Francisco. Marisa and her husband, Rob, had dinner on Valencia Street. When she took the driver’s seat of their new, black BMW 525i, she made a quick call on her cell phone and then hung up when the call was answered without saying a word.
 
“Who are you calling?” Rob asked.
 
“I want to see if my friend is coming over tomorrow to take me to apply for a job. But I didn’t realize how late it was, so I’ll call her in the morning,” Marisa responded.
 
“Okay. You don’t need to work, but if you want to, if that makes you happy, then you should do it.”
 
About half a mile away, Marisa stopped the car and said the check engine light had come on. “Don’t stop the car here,” Rob said. “This is not the best neighborhood; we can still make it home with that light on.”
 
Just then, a car pulled up behind them. A man quickly approached the vehicle’s passenger side and told Rob to get out. He held a gun pointed at Rob.
 
“Just do what he says,” Marisa told him. He got out of the car and tried to cooperate, not wanting any harm to come to him or his wife. Seven shots were fired as soon as he was out of the car. Three bullets pierced his skull while the rest entered and exited his chest.
 
When the police arrived, Marisa was crying, saying that Rob was her husband and that someone tried to carjack them and they shot Rob. But the car was still there, her purse was still inside, and she was still wearing the expensive diamond wedding ring Rob gave her. Marisa said she had no idea what the suspect looked like or what kind of car he was driving. She had no bruises, although she claimed the suspect hit her and pushed her to the ground so he could take the car. Her demeanor was also strange in that she did not ask about her husband’s condition or come close to his body, maintaining her distance from the crime scene instead. At the police station, she seemed confused and a little bit disinterested. She gave a vague statement to the police but became impatient when pressed for more details.
 
The police did not believe her from the start but had no basis for placing her under arrest. The facts, however, did not match up, as the route she took home was not the most direct route to the freeway entrance, which would lead them to the Bay Bridge and then to their home in the Oakland Hills. Something was up, and Marisa was not a persuasive grieving widow.
 
Rob died from gunshot wounds in the ambulance on the way to San Francisco General. When Marisa was told about his death, she did not cry. She looked more dazed than sad and said she wanted to go home. The police wound up notifying Rob’s family. They would soon learn that he was a 45-year-old executive at a software company in San Jose. He was a shy bachelor for most of his life and never dated much until he met Marisa. He met her at Golden Gate Park one day, where he was walking his dog. She approached him to pet his cocker spaniel. The dog seemed to like her, and Rob let her play with him for a while so he could get a closer look at her. She had long brown hair that was pulled off her face. She was petite, had curves in all the right places, and knew how to show them off. She was someone that people noticed. She was at ease with herself and struck up a conversation with him that flowed in a way his conversations with women never did. Before he knew it, she had given him her phone number, and they agreed to meet for a drink.
 
A drink led to her moving in with him quickly and then getting married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in San Francisco three months later. Rob bought a house in the Oakland Hills for them and gave her use of his credit cards, which she had no problem using. She bought expensive clothes, never worked again, and had frequent calls on her cell phone that she had to take in the other room. He never pressed for details of how Marisa spent her time or his money to prevent her from getting upset. In his eyes, she was a very emotional person with a strong personality and a quick temper, but also capable of moments of great tenderness.
 
Lonely nights alone at home in front of the television with fast food seemed worse to him than putting up with her mood swings. “Everyone can think you’re successful,” he would say, “but when you end the day at home alone, it sure doesn’t feel that way.” His family warned him about her, and she hated his family, saying they thought they were too good for her. Rob tried to keep the peace and wanted to make things work no matter what. He ignored her drinking and tried to bond with her son, hoping that being a good stepfather might score some points with her. It never did.
 
He never knew she was still seeing her old boyfriends, even after their marriage. Nor did he know or want to know who she brought to the house when he was at work. She partied with friends and lovers at home, impressing them with how she lived and telling them that she did not love Rob and would divorce him and collect alimony. They laughed and partied with her, had sex with her, but never imagined how far she would go.
 
The pain and abandonment she felt as a child and the men who used her along the way and then discarded her had caused a change in her. She was once a sweet, sensitive girl looking for someone to love her. Now, she only cared about partying and easy money. An expensive dress, nice jewelry, and money in her pocket validated her in a way that she never felt validated by other people. The pain she felt due to repeated abandonments made her do whatever was necessary to lessen the toxic energy she carried around inside despite the party girl vibe she projected.
 
She had no safety net, so she was not afraid to use any means necessary to get what she wanted. The drugs and alcohol eased the pain but blurred her sense of reality. Her old friends included several shady characters who fancied themselves as con artists and criminals who had gotten away with a lot, even if they wound up doing time for some of it. They would tell stories of schemes that had been successful and large amounts of money that could be made with the right planning and execution. When she told them she did not love Rob and was using him for his money, they encouraged her to get rid of him and cash in, as they were eager to keep her interested so she would continue to supply drugs and alcohol.
 
When she was high, it all seemed to make sense, and she had a feeling of invincibility that a sober Marisa would not have. She just needed to figure out how to get rid of him without getting caught. She spent many hours thinking about how to get it done. When an attorney told her that if she divorced him, she would not be entitled to very much, given the short time they had been married, she began to think that there was no other way to cash in but to kill him. She was not leaving this marriage empty-handed. She would not return to her old life with nothing to show for the time she was married to Rob. 
 
Eventually, she persuaded Rob to agree to purchase life insurance policies and mortgage insurance for the house, with her as the beneficiary. Then, before she knew it, the drunken conversations about hiring someone to kill her husband and collect the insurance proceeds turned into a plan of action. Her ex-boyfriend, Alex, who left her several times for other women, was back in her life and was seeing her at her house when Rob was working. She seemed to forget all the times he abused her and left her without explanation. She needed his approval, even after everything he had done to her. His return meant he was wrong when choosing someone else over her. At least, that is the story she told herself each time she took him back. Each knew that even though they both looked good, their days of trading off their looks were ending, and they needed a score to set them up.
 
Rob’s family began to ask questions about Marisa and told him to divorce her before it was too late. Rob’s demeanor towards her changed, and she found out that his parents had arranged a consultation with a divorce attorney. The end was coming, and she needed to act quickly. Marisa and Alex agreed to kill Rob on a dark street in the Mission District and make it look like a carjacking. Marisa would keep the house and the car and most of the insurance. She would give Alex one thousand dollars and the proceeds of one of the life insurance policies Rob had purchased.  

***

​As they rode the bus to Chowchilla, Dolores and Victor tried to keep cool in the sweltering heat. It took several hours to reach the Central Valley. As the bus exited Highway 99 and went east on Avenue 24, Dolores was glad the trip was almost over. Victor needed to use the restroom, and she needed to get this over with. Some things needed to be said, and she hoped she had the strength to say them without making things worse. The bus was filled with families of prisoners who seemed anxious to get there. However, their collective enthusiasm was tempered by the realization that they were headed to prison.
 
Above the almond trees, they could see the large complex, Valley State Prison for Women. It looked almost like a campus if it were not for the razor wire. It took them an hour and a half to work their way to the front of the line so they could be “processed.” As they passed through the metal detector, they removed their shoes and were searched by prison guards. Dolores almost did not believe they would search Victor, an eight-year-old boy, but figured they had seen it all and had no reason to trust anyone.
 
They were assigned a visiting table, and when Dolores first saw Marisa, she was shocked. Her hair was cut short and combed back off her face like a man’s. The baggy orange pants and top were in stark contrast to the stylish way Marisa dressed on the outside. All the make-up and embellishments she thought she needed were gone, yet the beauty of her bare face was still unmistakable.
 
“Mom!” Victor shouted when he first saw her, apparently not noticing the change in her appearance. She hugged him awkwardly and sat him right next to her. Marisa was happy to see her son and sister but was ashamed that they would see her like this. Marisa asked Victor about school and his friends and whether he was minding Dolores.
 
He then asked her, “When will you come home?”
 
After a long pause, Marisa responded. “I don’t know, mijo. Not for a very long time.”
 
“Why do you have to stay here so long?”
 
Marisa froze for a minute, not knowing what to say. When she was arrested, Victor was being cared for by a friend. Although he had visited her in county jail and had been to Chowchilla once before, she never explained why she was incarcerated. She never asked what Victor had been told by family and friends. She tried not to think about it and prayed that one day she would find a way to explain to him why she had been sent to prison. “It’s complicated,” she told him. “They said I did some bad things, and I’ll be here until the situation gets straightened out.”
 
Tears began to fall from Victor’s eyes as he listened to his mother. He knew what she had done because the neighborhood kids had no problem telling him, having heard about it on the news. He knew Rob was dead and that his mother was the one who had him killed. He heard it many times from various people but never told anyone that he knew. This caused bouts of sadness and anxiety which made him introverted.
 
“People say bad things about you, but I don’t care what they say,” Victor told Marisa. His voice was trembling. “I want you to come home so we can be together like before. I miss you.”
 
Marisa did not know what to say. She hugged him until she was told to stop by a prison guard. Here, visitors may briefly embrace their loved one upon greeting and again upon exiting the visiting room. Anything more was deemed “excessive.”
 
After a long silence, Dolores told Victor to get some food from the vending machines. She gave him several dollar bills to buy junk food, the only thing available to the prisoners and their visitors. “Bring your mom something to eat,” she told him. When he ran to the vending machines, a small line of people was waiting their turn. Dolores hoped this would occupy him for a little while so she could say what needed to be said.
 
“He misses you so much.”
 
“I know he does,” Marisa responded.
 
“He writes to you and makes cards for you, and you never respond.”
 
“You know I was caught up in the trial. Then I was sent to the reception center for ninety days to be evaluated. Then they sent me here. I had to get used to being here. It’s not easy for me. Don’t make it worse by coming here to give me head trips.”
 
“You’re his mother,” Dolores responded. “You didn’t think about him when you were scheming with Alex. You just thought about yourself and all the things you wanted. Now those things are gone, and all you have left is a little boy that misses you.”
 
Marisa remained silent, not knowing how to respond.
 
“Listen, I am not here to give you a hard time. You know you can count on me to care for him and be good to him like he was my own son. But I’m his aunt, and he still needs his mother.”
 
“What good am I to him behind bars?”
 
“I don’t know what to tell you, but you can’t keep trying to take the easy way out. He’ll grow up angry and hate you if you keep ignoring him. You have to be a mother to him from inside here because you may never come back out. I am telling you this so your son can know who his mother really is. He’ll find newspaper articles when he gets older, and, as you heard him say, people will tell him what happened. Is that what you want him to know about you?”
 
“But I told you, I didn’t kill him.”
 
“Marisa, it doesn’t matter; you were mixed up in it, and Rob is dead. You were convicted. Alex testified against you to save himself. Things might have turned out differently if you had spent more time taking care of Victor instead of looking for your next score. Have any of your friends visited you?”
 
“No,” Marisa responded. Tears began to flow from Marisa’s eyes, and she began to look at the floor.
 
“You were the lucky one,” Marisa told Dolores. “My aunt loved you and took good care of you. My grandmother didn’t want to raise me. She did it because she had to. She always wanted to be in church. She never talked to me. She just kept telling me to get saved and accept Jesus. You have no idea how many times I have been abused. I finally decided I wanted to be the one to take advantage of others. It all made sense to me when I was using. But I know I was wrong, and I’m paying for what I did.”
 
“I didn’t come here to make you feel bad,” Marisa responded, “but being a mother to Victor is more than just tattooing his name on your chest. He needs to know you love him and care how he is.”
 
“I just don’t know how. My mother wasn’t around, so I never learned how.”
 
“Well, you have plenty of time on your hands to learn,” Dolores said.
 
Victor came running back, his hands filled with bags of potato chips, candy bars, and soda. “Mom, here are some Cheetos for you. I know you like them.”
 
“Thanks.”
 
“Why are you crying?”
 
“I’m crying because I am happy to see you.”
 
“Did you get my card?
 
“Yes, it made me very happy. It made me have a nice Mother’s Day even inside this place.”
 
“My teacher said I’m a good artist.”
 
“You are. Thanks for thinking about me. It’s hard for me to write to you because I sometimes don’t have much to say. Nothing good happens here. But I will try to write to you. Send me some pictures of you when you have a chance.”
 
“I will, Mom.”
 
Dolores looked around the visiting room and saw several inmates who seemed to be visiting with their children and other family members. Some kids were younger than Victor; others looked like teenagers, almost ready to become adults. She thought about the amount of hurt that gets passed down from one generation to the next.
 
She often wondered how intense the pain must have been for their mother when she swallowed the sleeping pills and made her two daughters orphans. Had she known that one of those daughters would wind up in prison for life, would she have found the strength to survive? Would she have continued to be a mother to her daughters and keep them on the right track? She wondered if Marisa had considered all the pain and sadness that Victor would endure, would she have stopped herself from getting caught up in a man’s murder?
 
Marisa had a lot of time to think about these things while behind bars. She realized that she had left her son without a mother, much like what happened to her when she was a young girl. It was the last thing she would wish on anyone, much less her own son. Love, it seemed to Marisa, was transitory. You can’t count on it from one day to the next. Victor was the exception to that rule, yet she had ruined his life with her actions and did not know how to make it right. The guilt for what she had done to Rob and Victor was almost unbearable.
 
Just then, Dolores saw Marisa peering at her through the brown eyes she had always used to her advantage. She was stripped of all embellishments now, and all that was left was a battered soul in prison clothes. Next to her was a little boy who looked a lot like her. His happiness at being with his mother would be replaced by tears when he was in bed tonight, knowing that his mother would probably never come home.
 
The three of them sat silently for a few minutes, not knowing what to say. They heard the loud voices and chatter of the other inmates and visitors around them. They all seemed to know what to say and could be heard carrying on. But the three of them sat there and looked at each other, unsure how to relate to each other under these circumstances. When it was time to leave, they hugged each other tightly, and Victor did not want to let go.
 
“Thanks for bringing him and coming to see me,” Marisa said.
 
“Of course,” Dolores responded. “Let’s take this one day at a time. Un día a la vez.”
 
Dolores took Victor’s hand and walked toward the exit. The Central Valley’s overwhelming heat was waiting for them outside. She wiped the perspiration from Victor’s forehead. The heat was nothing compared to all the pent-up emotions in the visiting room. “Don’t worry mijo,” Dolores said to Victor. “If there is anything this family knows how to do, it’s getting through hard times.” 

Robert G. Retana is an attorney living and working in San Francisco. He is Chicano, originally from the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, as well as a Tribal Member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. He lives with his husband, Juan Carlos, and their faithful companion, Tigre, a dachshund mix.  Robert’s short story “Leaving Boyle Heights” was published in the Latino Book Review Magazine in 2021. He is a fan of the arts and currently serves as a Board Member of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco.  As a writer, he seeks to tell stories from marginalized communities that are often left untold.  

by ​Armando Gonzalez

Maria was in her room, sitting in a chair next to her bed, praying while holding her wooden rosary necklace. She was waiting for her husband to come home. She prayed that Miguel, her husband, wouldn’t work so much. Even on weekends, instead of being with her, he mostly spent it working. His wife used to tell him to stop telling people he was available to work because then he would have a lot of work, and most likely would end up working all week with little to no rest. Miguel didn't seem to mind though. He liked working.
 
Miguel left around eight in the morning. That morning, before he left, as he sat on their bed and was putting on his pants, Maria asked him what time he thought he would be back. He said probably eleven in the morning. While Maria was currently praying, it was soon going to be one in the afternoon. She hoped he didn’t lie to her.
 
After she felt satisfied with the amount of praying she had done, she began thinking of what could still be done around the apartment. Although she had basically completed all the necessary work, she still behaved like an employee on the clock, trying to find something to do so as to avoid being seen by their bosses doing nothing. She first went to the kitchen to see if the floor needed to be mopped. There were some footprints on the kitchen floor, most likely from Miguel’s boots when he was mowing lawns. It should have only taken somewhere around five minutes or less to clean it but she took her time. After she was done mopping the kitchen floor, she checked to see if there were any dirty plates in the kitchen sink. There were only two dishes and three glass cups. She washed them, just as slowly as she mopped the floor. After the dishes, she checked the wooden living room floor, but unsurprisingly, it was pretty clean. She checked all around the apartment to do any kind of cleaning, but there just wasn’t anything to clean. She thought of praying some more, but she didn’t think it was necessary, as she was taught by attending mass over the years, that it’s more about the sincerity behind a prayer than the amount of praying one does in a day. 
 
Suddenly, Maria got the idea to go to church. If Miguel wasn’t going to come home anytime soon, then she would go to church, even if it wasn’t Sunday. She knew that Miguel would get annoyed if she did this, and ask her why she went to church, even if she told him there was nothing to do at home. She ignored these thoughts.
 
She changed into a loose fitting dress, brushed her hair and put on black block heels.  Before she left, she told her kids if they were hungry, to serve themselves a bowl of the albóndiga soup she made. She told them that she would be back in an hour, and if their dad asked where she had gone, to tell them she had gone to church.
 
On her way to church, although she felt like she was partially going to church out of spite, she felt happy. She was happy because she felt like she was improving, becoming a more resilient person, each time she went to church. This happiness slowly faded away though, when she tried to push open the front doors of the church, only to find they were locked. She was very confused. She thought the church was open at all times. She went to the back of the church to see if there wasn’t possibly a mistake. When she was in the back of the church, standing behind a black steel gate, she expected there to be parked cars and people walking across the parking lot of the church, but instead she didn’t see any cars and or anybody walking. Just then, she saw someone. There was a man, coming out of the side doors of the church, who then started walking across the parking lot.
 
As soon as she saw him, she yelled: “¡Señor! ¡Oiga!”
 
The man stopped and turned towards the direction of where the yelling was coming from. He squinted his eyes, trying to find whoever it was who was yelling. Finally, his eyes met hers, and he began walking towards Maria.
 
“¿Está cerrada la iglesia? ¿Pensé que estaba abierta toda la semana?”
 
“Antes sí. Pero ya no porque gente de la calle se estaban metiendo, y eso estaba molestando a la gente.”
 
“¿De verdad? Nunca sabía que eso podía pasar. Bueno, gracias por decirme.”
 
She walked away, a bit saddened and disappointed. She was looking forward to going to church, especially since it was her first time going to church on a weekday. Unsure of what to do, she began walking home. All she wanted was to spend some time with Miguel. Now she couldn't even go to church on a weekday, which she thought wasn’t asking for much.
 
When she came back home, to her surprise she saw Miguel’s green truck parked on the curb right in front of their apartment. She remembered when he first brought the truck home, it was so bright and shiny. Now, because the car stood out in the sun for some years, the green paint was so faded that it almost looked like there were clouds painted on the hood and roof of the car. He bought the car from his boss, who sold it to him cheaply. When he brought home the truck, it seemed to Maria like a luxury, to be able to have another car. Now, she despised the truck, just the sight of it made her angry, because it symbolized one thing to her: money. Part of the reason her husband had bought the truck wasn't only because he wanted another car, but because he saw an opportunity to make money. The green truck enabled him to go quickly from lawn to lawn, with all the necessary equipment in the bed of the truck.
 
She opened the door to the living room. One of her sons, Daniel, who although wearing headphones that prevented him from hearing her come in, still did not turn around even when a line of sunlight directly hit the screen of the computer he was using when she opened the door. She was about to tap his shoulder to ask if his dad was home when she heard someone coming from the kitchen and down the hall to where she was. It was her husband, wearing his gray, long sleeve shirt, which was now sweaty and dusty and grass stained. Sweat poured down from his balding head. On top of his head were thin, short strands of hair, which were matted down from wearing a hat, which almost made him look like a newborn baby that was just taken from their mom’s womb. He was sucking on his long neck bottle of Corona.
 
“¿A dónde fuisteis?” He took a sip of his beer.
 
“Fui a la iglesia, pero no estaba abierta.”
 
“¿A la iglesia? Pero no es el fin de semana.”
 
“Ya sé.”
 
Her husband said nothing, just took another sip of his beer.
 
“¿Qué hiciste de comer?”
 
“Albóndigas.”
 
She walked to their room. While she was taking her block heels off and putting them under her bed, she asked him, “¿Pensé que ibas a llegar a las once de la mañana?”
 
“Yo pensé que iba a llegar en ese tiempo, pero los chinos querían que hiciera otro trabajo, y los acaparadores también me pidieron que hiciera otra cosa.”
 
“¿Por qué no les dices que no puedes, pero que lo puedes ser para otro día.”
 
“Pues, es que no quiero quedar mal con la gente. Es importante que les diga sí, o no sería capaz de hacer más dinero.”
 
He reached into his pocket to get his black worn out wallet and took out four twenty dollar bills and showed them to Maria. When she saw the bills, this did little to nothing to change the indifferent expression on her face.
 
“Gané ochenta dólares hoy. Y todavía hay dos personas que no me han pagado.”
 
“¿Son las mismas personas que no te pagaron la última semana?
 
“Uno sí. Es el blanco.”
 
“Deberás parar de trabajar por él. Nomás se está haciendo tarugo.”
 
“Ya sé, ya sé. A lo mejor sé.”
 
“¿Ya quieres comer?”
 
“Sí, dame.”
 
Maria walked to the kitchen to heat up the pot of albóndiga soup and got the griddle to heat some tortillas. Miguel took his time drinking his beer and then slowly walked over to the small kitchen. Once he sat down on a chair, Maria asked him “¿Cuántas horas trabajastes?”
 
“No más de cinco horas.”
 
“¿No más cinco horas?”
 
Miguel, unsurprised at his wife’s reaction, chuckled.
 
 “Cinco horas no es mucho.”
 
“Y te aseguro que no descansaste.”

“Los hombres no se cansan,” he said.
 
“Ya para diciendo eso. Los hombres pueden sentirse cansados,” she said with her face hardened, tired of the joke.
 
Miguel laughed, his head bouncing up and down, and said, “Okay, okay.”

​Once the albóndiga soup was hot enough, Maria got a bowl from the cupboard and started pouring the soup into the bowl. As she was pouring the soup and albóndigas into the bowl she was holding, Miguel asked her “¿Por qué fuistes a la iglesia a hoy?”
 
“Pues, no más se me ocurrió.”
 
Her husband, suddenly serious, didn’t immediately answer.
 
“No creo que sea necesario ir a la iglesia hoy.”
 
“Ya sé, pero me gusta ir a la iglesia cuando puedo.”
 
Maria placed the bowl of albóndiga soup in front of him. He didn’t eat more than one albóndiga when he asked: “Deberías enfocarte en lo que ser en la casa en vez de pensar en la iglesia.”
 
“No había nada que hacer aquí. Terminé todo.”
 
“¿Y no te vas a cansar mucho yendo a la iglesia durante la semana?”
 
“Si vamos a hablar de quién se cansa más, vamos a hablar de ti.”
 
Her husband laughed.
 
“¿Por qué te rías?”
 
“Okay, pero yo me canso por una buena razón,” he said with a grin on his face.
 
For the first time, she laughed, too, out of impatience for the way her husband spoke to her.
 
“De verdad tienes un problema. No más quieres trabajar, trabajar y trabajar. Dices que trabajas de necesidad, pero te pasas, como si no tuvieras dinero. Algunas veces, en el momento que vienes del trabajo, ya te quieres pelar para trabajar otra vez, no comas muy bien o no me dices que ya te vas a ir. Y cuando–—no me callas, deja mi de hablar–—llegas de tus otros trabajos a la casa, estás irritado, te enojas cuando los niños o yo no te ayudamos rápidamente a bajar todas tus herramientas del camión. Tú solo te haces infeliz por hacer algo que es de necesidad.”
 
“¿Qué quieres que haga? Si trabajo mucho, me canso, pero tengo dinero. Si no trabajo mucho, no estoy cansado, pero voy a tener poco dinero. Si realmente quieres que trabaje menos, ¿por qué no me ayudas o encuentras un trabajo?”
 
“Miguel, tú ya sabes que no puedo ser eso.”
 
“¿Por qué no? Creo que puedes hacer la mayoría de lo que no haces ahora y seguir trabajando.”
 
“¿Qué estás diciendo? ¿Que no trabajo?”
 
“¿Piensas que estar sentado casi todo el día es trabajo?” he said and laughed a mocking laugh, which made him appear like a child.
 
“Ya me estás ofendiendo.”
 
“Pues, no te mates.”
 
“¿No me mato? ¿Tú piensas que pudieras tener un trabajo y llevar a las niños a la escuela, comprar y hacer de comer, llenar la botella de agua, llevar los platos, limpiar la casa, lavar la ropa, tirar la basura, juntar a los niños de la escuela, y dar atención a los niños?”
 
“Todo lo que dijiste son trabajitos que se pueden hacer rápido.”
 
“No se puede prestar atención a los niños rápido, solo se puede hacer lentamente y con paciencia.”
 
Fed up with her arguing, he got up and left.
 
“¿A dónde vas?”
 
“Voy a regar el zacate.”
 
She was going to say more to him, but she knew when to stop talking, because at some point, in the middle of an argument, her husband would eventually start to tune out everything she said, even when she did have a point. She noticed he had barely eaten anything from his bowl. From where she was sitting at the small kitchen table, she could hear him in the backyard getting the hose to water the front lawn. She didn’t know what to do. After sitting in silence for a few minutes, she got up to get her wooden rosary from their room, and started to pray once again. 

by Angela Acosta

Humanity’s voyagers always came on ships, back when Sol was the closest star and home stayed within the ecliptic. They came from the places the maps would no longer show as star charts guided them towards lands where Terra would be but a distant memory. With skin colored from equatorial sunbeams and languages forged from centuries of cultural contact and strife, they were ready when the Exodus finally occurred, and generation ships whisked them away across a sea wider than the Atlantic.

Marcela tore her eyes from the screen that displayed the full weight of generations of ship born ancestors when a thin stream of light coming from the hallway alerted her of Zamora’s presence.

“¿Tienes chisme?” Zamora asked, sauntering into the room like only a little sister could.
​
Marcela relaxed her stiff shoulders and let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding in.  She’d tracked enough of the gamma lineage for this wake cycle. With the lights back on, she started reshuffling the notes she printed out on carbon copies that littered her desk.

“Yeah, turns out they meant to put you on the Calabaza ship and got the paperwork mixed up,” Marcela smirked, waving one of her notes in the air.

“No way! You know I can’t even cook frijoles right; I don’t belong on a restaurant ship. Unless, you know, I got to be the engineer and eat up all those delicacies.”

“You wish!” Marcela nudged Zamora with her elbow.

“So, made any progress today?”

“Five generations of lineage gamma from three centuries ago found in the data sent by laser from the Prerromano ship, no está mal,” Marcela shrugged and looked back at the data in front of her.

She continued, “It’s strange, really. There seem to be fewer lineages than active ships. I can’t find us in all the data. You know even Tía Flora gave up ages ago on this project.”

“¿A qué te refieres con lo de ‘find us’? I thought this was about the ancestry of the whole fleet. What do we have to do with anything? What does our ship’s history matter?”

“It means everything! I know I’m supposed to be collaborating on this project for the good of the fleet, but you know I’ve been doing some research on the side.”

“But they’re always telling us that we’re all siblings and that race doesn’t exist anymore, that we’re all homo sapiens. Somos de la raza…”

“Cósmica, literalmente. Pues ya lo sé, pero es un mito, uno de esos que vinieron con los primeros cohetes.”

Having just finished her own school lessons for the day, including a lecture on how the old ways no longer applied, Zamora was utterly perplexed. She perched herself on a free corner of Marcela’s desk and took a closer look at the branches of the family tree, thinning out as they got closer to the present moment of year 534 of the Exodus. 

“Mira Zamora, where is our family in this?” Marcela zoomed into a patch only a few years removed from Zamora’s birth in year 523. 

“It doesn’t matter…”

“Humor me.”

“¿A quién le importa?”

“Pues a nosotras, a todos los del Arbolito. Look, before I crunched in the data for gamma lineage, I already noticed some irregularities from the beginning. They’re telling us we’re doing something meaningful by putting together these lineages, that it’s for the good of the fleet and our history. It’s just busy work, Zamora.”

“Fine. I don’t know who all our family is, but Marcela tengo haaaaambrreeee. Can we pleaseeeee go the mess hall now? I heard Tío José is making pupusas and I want one that isn’t spicy.”

“Ya vamos, but I still want to learn more about this. Maybe I can bug Tía Flora about the genealogy research after dinner.”

Sure enough, Zamora piled her plate high with pupusas and maíz, freshly made from their onboard hydroponics garden. Marcela, ever the apprehensive about her research, took a smaller portion of food and joined the other kids and teenagers huddled around a game of dominos made from scrap cardboard. Zamora enjoyed the camaraderie but couldn’t wait to finally talk to some adults. For some reason they always stayed quiet about what they knew of their families, and though they praised her for her research, they never asked many questions or gave her any good leads. She always had to look elsewhere, like taking chances asking the Prerromano ship with a complicated array of laser networks to reach them five lightyears away.

Tía Flora was watching her favorite zero g handball game and knitting. Approach with caution, Marcela thought to herself. She sat herself next to her only biological aunt and engaged in the requisite small talk. By the second half of the game Marcela had steeled herself for the conversation.

“Tía, you know I’ve been doing a lot of work on the lineage, and I don’t need to bore you with it, but…”

“Mi’ja, I’m glad you’re doing that research project, but it doesn’t interest me anymore. What are you doing, hunting down lineage omega or something?”

“I’m working on lineage gamma now actually; I have five more generations worked out. In fact, I’ve already sorted out adopted and biological parents and have some diagrams for the research team I’m going to send by laser tomorrow…” Marcela needed to stop herself before she lost sight of what she came to talk to her aunt about. Tía Flora had already focused back on the game, the clinking of the knitting needles in synch with the pace of the game.

“Sorry, force of habit. Tía Flora, I want you to tell me about us. ¿Quiénes somos los del Arbolito? ¿De dónde venimos?”

Tía Flora finally perked up and cracked a smile, “It took you seventeen years to ask me that, eh? It took my friend Adriana over twenty and she quickly became disinterested again.”

Marcela relaxed in her chair and tucked herself into the story Tía Flora was inevitably going to launch into. Tía Flora switched to Spanish, as she was wont to do when talking about the past, but her tone of voice changed, and it was as if she saw herself somewhere else. The youth proudly tout the fact that the past was light minutes away and wholly unreachable while elders grieve that chasm of memories.

“Hace ya treinta años, Adriana me preguntó sobre nuestros antepasados. Y, a pesar de la falta de información que tenía, yo sabía que había que compartirla con cualquier persona que tenía el mismísimo deseo. Me imagino que hasta la Zamorita sabe recitar las historias oficiales de quienes somos, ¿cierto?”

Marcela smiled, “Justamente me las estaba contando según lo que va aprendiendo en la escuela.”

“Pues, la Adriana me dijo una frase que nunca jamás saldrá de mi mente. Me dijo basta con esas historias del Éxodo con las ramas de los árboles y que ‘I don’t want your tender history, give me the truth’. So I did.”

“Tender history, huh? Is it, though? Now that I really think about it, es un cuento de hadas. I’ve always wondered about how the data was received on these family trees and why I couldn’t ever find myself on them. You know, I always thought I was different for asking about my own heritage. Pero, there’s something they’re not telling us and it’s going to be bittersweet.”

“Yes, but I have no doubt you are as ready as you’ll ever be to hear it. Éramos muchos durante los primeros cohetes y hemos venido desde zonas muy lejanas de la tierra. Había gente de los ríos, de la selva llamada la selva amazónica, de islas y grandes continentes. Había de todo.”

“Pero nos han dicho que han venido todos de la península de Florida y que allí empezó la migración.”

“Que no, que la península solo tenía las bases de lanzamiento.”

Marcela muttered to herself, “that sure does make more sense…”

Tía Flora stared at the screen transfixed in thought, as if recalling the very thread of the ancestors she was to spring forth from her mind like Athena.

She continued in English, “I found…a packet of data. I was going through some of the earliest data sent about the different lineages and I found a diary. It was a real book too, scanned of course, but I hope somewhere those pages are still preserved. I had half a mind not to tell anyone about it and keep minding my business, especially since it’s not mentioned anywhere in the ever-expanding literature on Exodus genealogy. It was the diary of someone named Hortensia from the beginning of the exodus. She talked about several ships we still have in the fleet, la Calabaza, el Ateneo, el Dominicano, however there was something greater I learned that day. People who couldn’t afford passage on the Exodus fleet sold the only thing they had left. It confused me, because I know those people were so connected to their plastic items and chucherías.” The clicking of her knitting needles reminded Marcela of the noise of plastic toys her sister played with.

“But you figured it out, right?”

“Mi’ja, they had nothing left to give, no currency or valuable metals and they could barely even secure a kilo in the bulkhead, so they sold their names.”

“¿Qué dices? Ya tenemos todos los nombres. Nos han nombrado a todos nosotros.”

“Pero tú y yo solo tenemos un solo nombre, la María Victoria tiene dos, pero así son todas las Marías.”

“But we each have a name, tía. I still don’t understand.”

Tía Flora put down her knitting needles and beckoned Marcela closer. Parting her wavy dark hair, she began making a large braid.

“Nos han dicho que nosotros del Arbolito somos latinos. Somos de distintas regiones del continente de las Américas y todos hablamos español e inglés. There are at least five other ships like us with slightly different accents and facial features, and they make us believe we’re all the same.”

“We come from Terra, there’s no difference, is there? The skin color is just from the different melanin produced in sunnier, warmer places compared to colder ones.”

“Eres muy inteligente, you know there’s more than that. Yes, these colors used to define us and now we think more logically, but the Exodus took away our names and our culture. We had special foods, and, while I know most aren’t religious anymore, there were special ceremonies and festivals just for us. We gave that up the moment we named ourselves part of the fleet.”

Left, right, middle, Tía Flora’s fingers made quick work of Marcela’s hair. Marcela thought the braid felt odd, a bit lopsided, but she didn’t want to criticize her aunt. It’d be easy enough to readjust later.

Tía Flora secured the bottom of the braid with an elastic band and Marcela went in search of a mirror and finally saw what her aunt had so lovingly knitted into her hair. Her thick hair had been carefully sectioned into different braids, all coming together to form a larger braid that ran down the right side of her head.

“Mira, ¡qué bonita!” Tía Flora exclaimed, admiring her work.

“Thank you, tía. It’s your best creation yet. Where’d you learn to do something like this? We almost never wear our hair in braids. We’re supposed to keep it tied neatly away from our face with a ponytail or bun.”

“I got the idea from our ancestors. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors, the ones with wavy hair, textured hair, and hair dark as the hulls of our ships wore braids as a source of cultural identity. They wove patterns into braids to chart maps towards the homes they left behind just as we leave drawings as marks of each ship in the fleet.”

“That’s really beautiful,” Marcela reflected. She felt a tightness welling up in her chest and a newfound appreciation for the ancestors from Terra bloomed within her. Not even when conducting her research did she ever truly feel the full weight of the bygone generations who attempted to pass their knowledge to her. She was the product of dozens, if not hundreds of generations of sentient homo sapiens who kept humanity moving forward without forgetting their roots.

“It suits you well, your ancestors would be proud of you.”

“Thank you, tía. I have to ask; did you ever figure out any of the names they gave away?” Marcela was suddenly anxious, knowing she’d remember this moment for years to come. This was to be the moment when everything clicked, when she no longer was one of a multicultural fleet, but the daughter of people from countries she could find on the old globe.  

Tía Flora harrumphed, ostensibly at the terrible play that had finally ended the handball game, but Marcela knew it was really meant for her.

“Pues, ya te lo conté, we gave them up centuries ago. We tucked our braids into our helmets and some of us were smart enough to use the braids to spell our histories in Nahuatl, like the Calabaza ship. They’re the Xolapa from México. But us, we weren’t so lucky.”

“But couldn’t we take a DNA test? Contact other ships for information that might’ve been overlooked in the existing lineage. We could…”

“It’s too late for that. We’re never going to have their names or the certainty of knowing who our ancestors truly were, but I do have something you might want to see.” Tía Flora turned off the projector and sent her off to find Zamora. She needed to see this, too.

The chefs had already gone off duty and the sisters and Tía Flora huddled under the dimmed light of the mess hall. Zamora looked unsure of herself as she shuffled her feet in place, and Marcela wished the photons from the nearest star system could illuminate the dark portholes but they were once again too far in the black.

Tía Flora flipped through a few recipe books and finally settled on the one that looked the most battered and full of stains from centuries of moles and salsa.

“Pues mira. Ni el dedo de Colón podría apuntar a lo que está escrito aquí. Zamora, can you read for us?” Tía Flora put her hand on her shoulder in encouragement.

Zamora twisted her face like she’d just eaten a lime. “It’s in Spanish?”

“Claro, mi’ja. Así fueron escritos todos los libros de nuestros antepasados.”

“Pero solo hay una lengua escrita, el inglés,” Marcela chimed in.

“Pues me parece otra ridiculez de esa escuela…obvio que todos los seres humanos podían escribir con pluma. ¿Creen que los latinos iban a escribir sus historias en el idioma de otro contiente? Sound it out, you’ll figure out what it says pretty quickly.”

Zamora began, “Las galletas de Elisa. Se preparan con…con sus ingredientes favoritos. A ella…le gustaba hornearlas para días festivos como…como los cumpleaños y las quinceañeras.”

Looking over Zamora’s shoulder, Marcela read the recipe to herself and said, “It’s a cookie recipe, but it’s telling us about someone named Elisa. And the one on the page next to it says ‘Los pasteles de tío Oswaldo’. What is this, tía?”

“Girls, when they sold their names and left Terra with the Exodus, they made these recipe books to share their favorite dishes. They turned recipe books into the ancestors they couldn’t take with them. These are their obituaries.”

“But there’s hardly anything about Elisa in this…” Marcela protested.

“You must read the whole book; each recipe gives you a little more about each person’s story. I’ve been piecing together when people were born and that sort of thing.”

“So we can finally put together this lineage?”

“No, so we can read about their lives. We can honor them even without the branches on the Arbolito all filled out. Many of these people likely aren’t related to us anyway.”
“Marcela, basta con your research. Tía, have you ever made these recipes?” Zamora interrupted.

“We still make some of them, but without the animal products they had access to on Terra they probably don’t taste the same.”

“Can we still try?”

Tía Flora chuckled to herself, “I’d thought I’d never see the day when you’d want to try to bake something. Sure, tomorrow morning you don’t have any lessons so why don’t you bring some of your friends to the kitchen and we’ll whip something up.”

The next day, Zamora and a few of her friends were busily churning out cookies under the careful watch of Tía Flora using ingredients rationed for those who weren’t on the team of cooks. Notwithstanding Zamora’s occasional clumsiness and trepidation around the oven, the lunch rush was ecstatic to try something new. A few of the adults even petitioned to add the sugar cookies to the dessert menu, the highest honor for the young bakers. Zamora later tearfully told Marcela that it was all her fault if they ship her off to the Calabaza ship now that she can properly bake.

Marcela sometimes wished she were as capricious as her younger sister, but age and her research kept her curious. She wanted to beam to everyone else on the research team that it was just a project to keep people busy. They were fed packets of data and crunched the numbers all day long so the ships with the most resources could continue chasing after habitable planets and building new spaceports. Those very families must have taken her own ancestors’ names hostage centuries ago.

Indignant, Marcela clenched her hands and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, imagining a warmth spreading through her body as if she were spirited away to her ancestors’ hot and humid homelands.

She closed out some of the programs she had been running with the ancestry data and set aside a data packet for herself to send to a few trusted friends she had on the Arbolito and other ships. Speaking clearly into the monitor in front of her, she spoke a language she hoped to one day be able to write.
​
“Soy Marcela, del Arbolito. Créeme cuando les explico que nuestros antepasados tenían nombres para sus familias. Mi tía me dice que sus nombres fueron vendidos a los que controlaron el Éxodo y que fueron tirados como basura de plástica. Ya no quiero repetir esa historia, así que quiero que nos nombren. Hasta que tengamos anclados a los linajes todos los nombres, me llamaré Marcela Nombremos. Puede que parezca contra los deseos de la flotilla, pero quiero identificarme como persona con una historia. Cualquier interesado puede usar este nombre. No lo daré a mis hijos si los tenga. Es un nombre a alquiler, un nombre que declara su intención. Espero que les sirva.”

​Angela Acosta is a bilingual Mexican American writer and Ph.D. Candidate in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University. She won the 2015 Rhina P. Espaillat Award from West Chester University, and she was recently nominated for Best of the Net. Her speculative writing has or will appear in On Spec, Eye to the Telescope, Radon Journal, 365tomorrows, and Shoreline of Infinity. Her work has been featured in Latinx magazines like Panochazine, Somos en escrito, and Latinx Audio Lit Mag. She is author of the speculative poetry collection Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Books 2022) and chapbook Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press 2023). She enjoys rock climbing and biking in her free time.

​I’ve just returned from my very first visit to Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, México where I attended the most spectacular birthday celebration for the miraculous San Francisco, the town’s patron saint. Magdalena was the town where both my mother Dolores and my grandmother Conchita had been born and raised. And in this same town in 1923, my Nana Conchita busted my grandfather’s antique black clock with a hammer, divorced him and with just my ten-year-old mother and a mochila, came to Nogales, Sonora where my grandmother’s two sisters, Carmela and Dolores, lived. After a short stay, my Nana Conchita found work as a laundress in Arizona and she and my mother ended up in Barrio Anita, one of Tucson, Arizona’s poorest barrios, and that’s where my four older sisters and I were born.
 
I sincerely believe that if you’re very lucky, in your life there is someone whose words you will never forget, and for me, it was my Nana Conchita. She may have never told me that she loved me, and I may have never told her that I loved her, but in both of our corazones, in our hearts, without these words, we knew. So, right here I have to declare that I truly love and remember everything that my grandmother told me and I will never forget her words. I no longer have her in my life, and I do not remember exactly when she gave me this advice, but here it is: She said that when a very esteemed person in your life leaves this earth and you can no longer see them, their spirit, their essence, will continue to visit you in your dreams, your memories, and they will even walk right next to you even though you will probably never actually see them; but if you’re really lucky and have faith, sometimes you can feel their presence.
 
And if you find yourself all alone in a desperate, dangerous situation and in need of guidance and help, that’s when you will hear and maybe even see them because they will always come to help you. When she said this, I almost wanted to ask her if she would be by my side and come to help me if I ever needed it, but I thought it would be disrespectful so I didn’t say anything. She did not say anything either, but she looked intently at my face and the next thing she did was smile and pat my shoulder, the very same shoulder that she always used to hoist herself from any sitting position.
 
I thought that with my crazy imagination I would surely see spirits like Lola, my mother, sees Dusty, her best friend long gone, but I never saw any until tonight. And it could very well just be a myth, but like I read somewhere what a folklorist wrote about myths: If you believe that they’re true, then they’re true. So, for me, this is true: I believe that my grandmother will always be by my side forever, and she will come to help me if I need her just as she did tonight when she appeared and helped me save that little girl at the dry riverbed in Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico.
 
And tonight, right before I go to bed, I am remembering very clearly my grandmother’s precise description of the fiesta that she told me about over fifty years ago when she was around sixty years old; I was around twelve, newly-arrived from Salinas, California where I had lived the last four years speaking only English. But even so, my grandmother and I had many long conversations because she understood my English perfectly and I, slowly, eventually, learned her Spanish.
​
In my saved-memories, very vividly I can picture my Nana dressed in a faded flannel nightgown and robe and praying the rosary every single night before she went to bed. She would slowly kneel next to her dresser where she had an improvised altar with her eight favorite saints. In between the rosary’s misterios, she would abruptly stop her praying and with her soft, sleepy voice and in great detail, she would describe Magdalena’s wondrous fiesta and the authentic Sonoran culinary delights that no other state in Mexico or Tucson restaurant could ever hope to duplicate or beat.
 
These two were her fondest memories and she never stopped telling me this. “¡Pos sí, Quinta, créyemelo o no, pero de veritas, anque hiziya un pinchi calor de la tiznada—y esto anque juera o no juera ya en el mes de octubre—no cave duda que la fiesta del milagroso San Francisco en mi pueblito de Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, era la fiesta más grandiosa de todo el mundo y con la mejor comida en todo México!”
 
Yes, these were my grandmother’s exact words in her very own distinctive and unique “imperfect” Spanish which included a truly impressive range of misuse, mispronunciations y las muchas malas palabras that I surely hope won’t offend anyone. And guess what? I now have to totally agree with my grandmother: The fiesta for San Francisco is the grandest celebration in the whole world and with the most delicious dishes in all of Mexico, especially the pozole de gallina pinta which is made with beef, pinto beans and hominy, and it is absolutely not a painted chicken! ¡Pero, híjole, Chihuahua, it was just like she’d said, for it being the month of October, it sure was tiznada HOT!!! 

​What you will never ever imagine when you see me standing anywhere looking toda rascuachita, chamagosa, y cochambruda, holding onto my notepad, my beat-up and battered famous quotations book, thesaurus, and Spanish and English dictionaries in my hands, is that I have the audacity to call myself a writer; but honestly, I do!!! I do!!! I mostly write about my good, bad, joyful and sad memories; lots of descriptions of my days, music that I love, my crazy relatives, my typing clients and all of our inane nonsense and shenanigans. I started writing the day that I got my book of famous quotations and my English and Spanish dictionaries sometime before my twelfth birthday. I remember when I told my Grandmother Conchita that I wanted to be a writer, she told me with her usual enigmatic words whenever I came up with an impossible, quixotic goal: “Ay, Quinta cabrona, ¿pos cuantas veces te voy a dijir que ‘del dicho al hecho hay muncho trecho,’ eh?” Which crazily translates to something like this: From the saying/statement to the action/deed there is a very long distance/space.
 
My Nana always felt that my writing (grouped along with my reading, daydreaming and my obsessive counting) was nothing but another one of my “puras bavosadas y pendejadas despilfarradas,” saliva-drooling nonsense that would make me waste and fritter away an entire day doing absolutely nothing. But anyway that didn’t stop me. First chance I’d get I would sneak away somewhere to write, but without fail my grandmother would find me, then she’d sigh, sniff and snicker, and—THUNK!—right there’s when she’d smack me on the head with her shoe or with the end of the broom or with whatever else was in her hands.
 
Well, believe it or not, in spite of the literal and figurative chingazos that life and my grandmother gave me, I still continued to write every chance I got because I wanted and needed to make some sense of my life that was filled with empty blank areas and horrific nightmares and of course this has turned out to be a super-long and difficult endeavor without a final resolution in sight.
 
Well, besides claiming to be a writer, I have another delusion of grandeur: I could’ve become a photographer like the woman who went around 14 La Quinta Soledad taking pictures of very sad and very poor people during the Great Depression. I forget her name—but it’ll come to me when I least expect it—anyway, just like her, I would have plenty of these gloomy subjects around here, except that I would prefer to take photographs of smiling people if I could find any.

And I would’ve been a good photographer because I have a tendency to view life like as if I was holding my hands out in front of me, my two thumbs together making a square, but missing the top line, and I am always checking out the lights and shadows and colors. For dramatic and most gripping effect, I especially like either the stark blacks and whites like in negatives, or a kaleidoscope of the latest-invented eighty-four Crayola rainbow colors to place over people’s heads.
 
With the camera in my mind I can very expertly create the most riveting dramatic images and scenes to either photograph plainly or to film with plenty of freezes, slow and fast motion speeds, super-impositions, compressed times with rolling white meringue clouds, deliberately out-of-order flash-backs to the past, flash-forwards to the future, intentional blurs for dramatic effect, and instant replays for the dumb ones who missed it the first time.
 
And because I like to write, I can even write the piquant and racy dialogue and deep-voiced narrative voice-overs, or else the people can talk sentences with just their eyes or with their words in bubbles over their heads like in the comic books. Or in contrast, I can even imagine the most tranquil inky-dark absolute silence like in a black bottomless abyss where a giant octopus awaits with its eight lazy floating tentacles.
 
Plus, not only that, but to accompany these scenes or images, I always then select the background music that will perfectly fit the mood, themes, or even the wild pacing of my photographs or films like from the most soporiferous sleep-inducing gringo classics like from Brahms’ “Waltz in A Flat Major, Op. 39, No. 5,” to any of the raunchiest and liveliest Mexican corridos norteños like from Los Alegres de Terán, or even the beer-drinkers’ favorite anthem: “Volver, Volver,” sung loudly by just about any drunk chorus of borrachentos desentonados right before the serious fistfights begin.
 
Needless to say, if you’re going to have delusions, you might as well go to the very top pinnacle, like up to Mount Everest, and that’s precisely why, in all of my daydreams and fantasies, I myself could’ve become a famous photographer just like Dorothea Lange—somewhere in my memory bank I found the answer that I needed: Dorothea Lange was the Depression photographer’s name and the name of the woman in her most famous photograph was Florence Thompson.
 
Or, you know, I could’ve even become a movie director like Alfred Hitchcock and I would give myself lots of cameo roles, and then I’d unobtrusively stroll in and out of all the different murder scenes, like maybe I could be a detective taking copious notes in a red spiral notebook, and plus I would get to mingle with the real actors and eat the fabulous catered meals under a rented tent.

At present time, I am a typist for my relatives, friends, felons, juvenile delinquents and a few law-abiding citizens, and I like to introduce myself as a “writer” to them. Although to be sure you could rightly say that calling myself a “writer” is quite a hyperbolic exaggeration because I truly believe that my command of both the English or Spanish languages is almost non-existent due to the fact that I have a very wonky manner of speaking and writing in a very mixed-up hodgepodge manner with improper bad English, pocho-mocho Spanish, Spanglish and code-switching.
 
But before you know it, like an uninvited intrusive comadre mitotera butting into the conversation, my Past always inserts itself into my Present every chance it finds, and then I can’t find margins or seams to separate the two. At these times I even think that I could be like Joanne Woodward in the movie “Three Faces of Eve,” where she had multiple personalities because when she was a little girl she was forced to touch her dead grandmother. But I know for a fact that I never touched my Nana Conchita to give me this kind of trauma because I never even went up to her coffin. And besides, to be honest, sometimes I think that I don’t even have one personality, much less three!!!
 
And added to that is the bad habit that I have of always hesitating before answering anything because I have to first, calmadamente, translate the words in my mind, Spanish to English, or English to Spanish, until I form a mental picture of them like as if I was going to take a photograph of them for my favorite Graphic Arts class at Tucson High way back in 1955 to 1956 when I was almost sixteen years old, in the ninth grade, and right before I dropped out of school for the first time.
 
Because of my high vocabulary score on my last exam when I ended the eighth grade at John Spring Junior High in 1955, I was mistakenly placed in Miss Benvenuto’s Advanced Reading and Writing English Class at Tucson High School where I surely had no business being there. In Miss Benvenuto’s class I had to read novels and short stories, write essays, and learn grammar and punctuation. Of these, what I did learn to enjoy the most was the reading of the assigned short stories and novels and then writing what I thought about them.
 
But learning the punctuation and the grammar gave me the worst headache that not even my Nana’s sliced raw potatoes on my forehead could take away. Las desgraciadas commas, I just tended to willy-nilly insert them like as if they were raisins in the oatmeal cookies, and I walked out of the class before I learned what a semicolon or a colon was really good for. But I do love the dashes that interrupt whenever and wherever they want—just like I do—and the parentheses that I stick in anywhere and anytime always remind me of those know-it-all viejas chismoleras that you can always count on to give you that extra, sometimes trivial, information. As for the exclamation marks, Miss Benvenuto insisted that only one was needed, but sometimes if something’s exciting, frightening or terribly important, I use three!!!
 
So without any nalgas huangas excuses or apologies, in April, 1956, I walked out of Miss Benvenuto’s class and dropped out of school before I even finished the ninth grade. In September, 1956, I did start the ninth grade all over again at Belmont High in Los Angeles, but I only lasted almost two months and around the end of October I dropped out for good this time and I returned to Tucson. And to be honest, I can sincerely say that in both of those ninth-grades, except for maybe the Typing and Gregg’s Shorthand classes, I didn’t learn anything even remotely worthwhile.
 
But now, in my writing, like as if it was a fence separating any of the feuding barrio neighbors, I just stick a semicolon in wherever I want; and the colon I use like as if it was a trumpet announcing a list or something important, or else it’s right before a famous quotation. To this date I still forever use the sacred punctuation marks without respect or boundaries or even omit them completely, but, really, put simply, what almost anyone really needs is two things: a question mark that wants an answer and a period that stops everything in its tracks, like this: period.
 
There’s lots of things that I’ve forgotten, thrown away or left out intentionally, and there’s still many more things that I’ve confabulated, obfuscated, sugar-coated and glossed over and which surely proves or confirms why Miss Benvenuto called me an unreliable narrator who had no form or structure!!!
 
And sorry, here I’m not “copping a ‘tude,” an expression that my juvenile delinquent clients always use, but I don’t even give a tiny rat’s pizzle about my sentences that tend to run-on untethered like cucarachas when you turn on the kitchen light with a can of Raid in your hand, and I ignore all of the rest of that boring English chicken-cuacha which included all the pendejadas like predicates, split infinities, dependent and independent clauses, sentence fragments; past, present and future tenses, transitions, points of views, diction, active and passive verbs and all the other chingaderas that never agreed and that I either violated, abused, mis-used, mis-placed, or like as if they were limp huevos boludos, I just simply left them somewhere dangling.
 
Right off, no matter how much I try to learn what Form and Structure means in writing, I obviously have no grasp of whatever that is. So, I do have to admit that I am just like as if I was a chapulín hopping around with all the other grasshoppers in a green alfalfa field. I have a tendency to either over-write or under-write and I do repeat a lot of senseless things or jump forward and backwards with the subject, point of view, time, place, mood, transitions and dates all out of order. I also create a very confusing syntax where the arrangement of my words inevitably either leads to muddled confusion or to scornful disdain. I don’t know how or why, but I even somehow manage to turn my statements into questions. Like this, you see?
 
But anyway, who cares what I violated to my heart’s content and even though I may not have learned the perfect punctuation and grammar before I walked out of Miss Benvenuto’s class, for sure what I learned was how to take very good notes because to this day I sagely and diligently follow the advice of an Italian man named Dante Alighieri who in my battered book of famous quotations wrote: “He listens well who takes notes.”
 
I have a perfect photographic memory (eidetic is the exact word in my English dictionary and in the newspaper’s crossword puzzle). So, with my notes I can recall anything with the most exquisite details in either English or Spanish, and I can describe, almost word for word, the things that I see, hear, touch, smell, taste, or feel. And of course, inevitably, to spice things up, I add my own music, imagery and dialogue. Well, sometimes I do forget the names of famous people or movies or words to a song, and I mix up a few places on the map, and some dates and even some years. But when I really need or want to remember something, it just comes to me, and conversely or reversely, when I don’t want to remember something, it doesn’t.
 
To be honest, with any one of my stolen pens or pencils that I have an overwhelming compulsion to steal, I can fill up pages and pages with my writing. When I am finished, I put them in a folder and label them as “Chapter” and I add a number and a few descriptive words to help me find something without going through all the pages. Some of these “chapters” are long, some are short, and most are choppy and wacky! Then I stuff them into my Salinas suitcase along with the stash of pens and pencils that I bundle into groups of hundreds.
 
On my “feeling good” days, I take out some of what I’ve written and I try to bring things up to date or to provide more information. I label it with capital letters: “UPDATE” and add descriptive words like I do on the “Chapters.” I think it’s like when you write postscripts in letters or film flash-backs and flash-forwards in movies. Some of these are brief and some are long with more details, but still not counting as a chapter.
 
This, of course, wreaks havoc with my past and present tenses, and in some of the dizzying transitions where I jump from there to here or from here to there, and get my dates mixed up, but I believe that’s exactly how people talk, so why not in writing? Anyhow, in my defense, all I can say is that when I’m not purposely avoiding something or else leaving out important information, I try my very best to stay truthful and really, aside from the lies in the letters and forms that I have to type for my quasi-law-abiding or my truly-felonious clients on another one of my client’s stolen electric typewriter—and these surely don’t count because I only type what they tell Mack or me—I never knowingly tell a lie, and so, on this you can trust me completely and implicitly.
 
But not to brag, I really think that if anyone will give me a word and its meaning, I can easily write a sentence with twelve or more words and it will be perfectly coherent and intelligent-sounding even if I can’t pronounce the word itself, and which is why I never could appear on “Jeopardy,” and that’s irregardless—yes, I do know that’s not a word—of how much I adore the handsome Alex Trebeck, but there really wouldn’t be one solitary interesting thing about me that we could discuss when he comes back after the break to chat with the contestants.
 
And although I’ve probably been speaking English all my life, I still speak it with an accent, and this I only know because when I was a student at Belmont High in Los Angeles, I applied for some kind of student/worker telephone operator job, and after the woman extolled my high test scores, she told me I couldn’t be hired because I had an accent! Well, I don’t know where the accent came from, but I suspect that it is in the genes before we are even born. So, yes, it’s an example of bitter irony at its best because when have you understood what any foreign telephone operator in New Delhi tells you nowadays? And sometimes, can you believe this, I’ve even been asked by some jackass what country I’m from?!!!
 
Well, if my English is horrid, you can bet for sure that my gobbledygook Spanish comes close to jack-shit, and I always like to make jokes about it because I surely cannot explain all that baloney about the assimilation and acculturation process; I just know that I am a product of a school system where speaking Spanish was forbidden, Treaty of Guadalupe or not.
 
So, anyway, pues, here’s where I think that I started to speak Spanish. In July, 1952, at age eleven and seven months, I came back from Salinas, California to Tucson, Arizona to help take care of my grandmother at 937 North Contzen in Tucson’s Barrio Anita. My Nana Conchita had just had an operation on her hips, and she had a cast on her left side from her waist to the beginning of her thigh, and on the right side, the cast went from her waist to her knee. Since she couldn’t move up from her bed for around six weeks, I was there to attend to her needs which were quite extensive, but the main one was to keep her entertained with lively conversations so she wouldn’t get into a bad mood or all sad and melancholy about the Mexico she’d left behind in 1923.
 
I don’t remember what language I spoke the first eight years of my life here in Tucson, 1940 to 1948, because those years are a total blank, but for the next four years, I had lived in Salinas, California from 1948 to 1952, where no one would be caught dead speaking Spanish for fear of being mistaken for a piojoso bracero field-worker from Mexico. In turn, my Nana Conchita was from Mexico and in the United States since 1923, but she wouldn’t be caught dead speaking English and be mistaken for an officious social worker from the welfare department even if it meant being called a guacha, or one who still wore guarachis on their feet and the cotton calzones de manta underwear, like as if she was a peasant soldadera in the revolution with Pancho Villa.
 
At first my Nana’s Spanish, even before her sleeping or pain pills started to work, had sounded like plain gibberish to me, but it seemed as though since my arrival that hot and windy afternoon, by pure force, but most likely because I had spoken Spanish in the first eight years of my life when I had lived before in Tucson, already I was re-learning Spanish by the minute, and by constantly interrupting and asking questions and forming mental images with the answers, I could instantly translate to English the gist of what my Nana was saying in Spanish, and somehow she always understood what I said in English.
 
To me, young as I was, some things that my Nana said made sense, others didn’t, and some I may have invented as the years went by because my memories always tend to jump around like pork chicharrones on the hot grill. In some strange way, I managed to memorize most of what she told me, and that’s why even now I try to write her words exactly as I heard them, and I don’t care who objects to them or who dares to correct me. And for sure, I really don’t care if someone tells me that they are “imperfect,” or that they don’t know what they mean because like I always like to say: that’s precisely why dictionaries were invented. (Hint. Hint.)
 
Anyway, I could talk to her and jabber away as much as I wanted to in English and she would answer me in Spanish, and if ever I had become a movie screenwriter and had written the dialogue for the scenes with my Nana Conchita, the actor portraying her would only speak Spanish and my grandmother’s words would be shown in English subtitles at the bottom of the screen, like in those foreign movies where you have to read really fast so you won’t miss seeing the actors’ dramatic facial expressions or subtle movements, and her bad words would be like this: @#%$^&*%# like in cartoons where someone smashes their fingers with a hammer!!!
 
I never really wanted to speak any Spanish, but not understanding my Nana when she told me that when I’d gone to California I’d left Guatemala for Guatepeor, made me resolve to pay more attention to the Spanish because, who knew, maybe, unlike the people in Salinas, California, here in Tucson, Arizona they were so backwards that that’s all the people spoke. But still, my Spanish must’ve been good enough because anyone in Barrio Anita that was allowed to be my friend spoke the same “improper and rascuacho” Spanish that I did, and so without going into details, that should tell you enough.
 
So, in less than a month after arriving in Tucson, I start to speak Spanish effortlessly—well, almost effortlessly—and soon I could easily switch from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English. Maybe it was like I remember René Martínez, the dishwasher in Salinas who started to speak English from one day to the next like as if he always had the English stored in his brain without his even knowing it; or maybe it was because I must’ve spoken Spanish earlier in my life; or maybe it was just because I was surrounded by it, here in this Tucson Barrio Anita.
 
That same summer when it was raining so hard that I could not go outside, not even to feed the chickens, and I only had the “Confidencias” magazines that my Nana Conchita’s two sisters sent to her from Nogales, Sonora for reading, so I taught myself to read in Spanish, slowly and by mouthing the words. In these “Confidencias” magazines, my Nana detested the monthly horoscopes that she called “puras brujerías fraudulentas,” but which I avidly devoured. Eventually, though, I believed these horoscopes had to be the most stupidest things I’d ever read, because even if the “Confidencias” had been up-to-date, and even when I cheated and tried three different Zodiac months, the actual December, and then November and January, none of the horoscopes even came close to fruition for me.
 
These magazines consisted mostly of what my Nana called las vaquetonadas y sinvergüenzadas indecentes, but which really just described nicely and circumspectly the latest escapades of the beautiful movie star María Felix and the results of the latest crooked political elections and what the newly-elected officials were already planning to steal next after they dedicated a new dam for the applauding campesinos. The two things that my grandmother really liked to read were the maudlin and soppy advice for the lovelorn, but only if she agreed with it and if it didn’t call for any of the forgiving “mierdero,” and the recipes that didn’t require strange ingredients like plantains and alcaparras and habichuelas, ingredients that were unknown to the Chino grocers, so she never made any of these dishes.
 
Well, I did manage to learn Spanish, as the saying goes, something like this: “de el trote y al moche,” and today I can brag that I can speak, read and write Spanish, albeit very badly—so, go ahead and call it an “improper and rascuacho” Spanish. And even so, by stretching the definition somewhat, you could say that I’m bilingual, which supposedly is a good thing to put down on any employment application, especially here in Arizona where probably over half the population speaks Spanish, or at least until some tapados get it outlawed.

​A native of Tucson, Arizona, Silviana Wood received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arizona and has been involved in the local theater community since the 1970s. She is known for her bilingual comedies and dramas as well as for being a professional storyteller, actor, director, and teacher of literature and Chicano theater. Silviana has twice won the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from the University of California, Irvine: once for short story, and once for drama. She has also received playwriting fellowships and done several residencies at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. She has been a member of TENAZ (El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), Teatro del Pueblo, Teatro Libertad, and Teatro Chicano and is a founding member of Mujeres Que Escriben, a Latina writers’ group that was formed in 1991 and is comprised of professional women whose poetry and fiction have been published in various anthologies. In 2016, Barrio Dreams: Selected Plays by Silviana Wood was published by the University of Arizona Press.

by Tommy Villalobos

Giggles walked like she was dancing to Oldies But Goodies, Volume One. But she also looked sad all the time. It was like she wanted to be sad. Her friends already had a Sad Girl so they called her Giggles.
 
People called me Gordo. I wasn’t fat. Maybe just a little.
 
But let me get back to Giggles. She was the finest one in the Projects, 1950’s.
 
One day, Lil’ Chango, skinny with a face that not even a madre could love, tried talking to her. He was barking like a seal up the wrong playa. I looked at her face when she was listening to the bato. Her lips were twisted. Like he was making funny noises with his nariz.
 
He walked away with his head looking down, like he didn’t care if a carucha hit him. She looked at me and I made a serious face. Inside, I was laughing like when I saw that cartoon where the coyote gets hit by a giant rock when he’s chasing the pájaro loco.
 
Giggles started walking again with that special wiggle. I wanted to tell her something like a priest. I walked fast.
 
“Hija, you can tell me,” I said.
 
She turned to look at me like I was a cucaracha walking around her sopa.
 
“I don’t know you.”
 
“I want you to.”
 
“I like someone.”
 
“Never saw you with someone. Never saw you with anyone.”
 
She looked at me like I was another cucaracha but this time in her sopa.
 
“Are you following me around?”
 
“Even when I sleep.” I was trying to sound romantic like in a song.
 
“Don’t!”
 
“All girls like being looked at.”
 
“Not me.”
 
“We’re meant to be.”
 
“Uh-uh.” She walked quickly away. Almost ran.
 
People could ask me why I didn’t give up. You know, chase other girls who liked gordos.
 
I would tell them that girls act in different modos. They can hate you but then you say or do something they really like, they grab you and put your arms around them. You feel like an octopus wearing a Pendleton.
 
“Where have you been, Felipe?” said my mother as soon as I walked in the door.
 
“Getting fresh air.”
 
“There isn’t any.”
 
I wanted to tell her about Giggles but she might not like her walk.
 
“Áma, I like this girl and—”
 
“She won’t be the last.”
 
“This one is the first and only. She is special.”
 
“She lives in Beverly Hills?”
 
“Huh?”
 
“Take out the garbage.”
 
I took the garbage outside. A chavalo called Freddie saw me.
 
“Hey, Phillip,” he yelled. He was the only one who called me by my name.
 
“What?” I said to the mocoso.
 
“You want to play baseball?”
 
He didn’t see that I was grown up. Baseball was for chavalos. Girls were more fun now.
 
“Freddie, I like girls now,” I said like I was confessing to a priest.
 
“What?”
 
Freddie was stunned, making a cara like I said I liked wearing dresses now.
 
“One day, you’ll throw your baseball to your sister because you won’t be able not to.”
 
I really thought of saying that because his sister Lydia was a better baseball player than him and she was only seven.
 
“You’re talking crazy, Phillip. Go get your mitt, let’s play.”
 
“Maybe later,” I said, knowing “later” really meant never.
 
He turned and walked away. He turned back to look at me as if he wasn’t sure who I was. Then he disappeared into the Projects. I felt kind of sad. Like my childhood was disappearing with him.
 
Then I thought again about Giggles and I wanted to kick Freddie and my childhood further into the Projects. God made something more fun than baseball.
 
Then my friend since I forget how long, Jimmy, saw me. We were the same age. He was more serious than me. Of course, my mother would say everyone was more serious than me.
 
Jimmy loved math and collecting baseball trading cards. His cards took up most of his life.
 
And the girls all looked at him like he was Elvis. It didn’t seem to matter to him. He spent his time with his math books and cards. Everything else was for other guys.
 
“Gordo, why are you standing there?” he said.
 
“Thinking.”
 
“About what?”
 
“Not sure. Where are you going walking all fast?”
 
“My mom needs butter.”
 
“You still run mandadas?”
 
“Sure. You don’t?”
 
I nodded slowly.
 
“Jimmy, oh, Jimmy!” said a high voice belonging to a running flaca with flying pelo.
 
It was Lorna Ritas. She was in a race for Jimmy with Sally Lomenez, Linda Mistasosa and Maria Lobermie. They had a better chance with the real Elvis. Jimmy barely said “Hi” to them but each time they took it like he wanted to make out with them at Belvedere Park.
 
Like that song, Jimmy only had eyes for Rachel Apenuz.
 
Rachel Apenuz had no personality I could see. Jimmy saw something the rest of the world didn’t, like in those spooky movies.
 
Compared to Rachel, Giggles was a shiny pair of spit-shined calcos. Rachel was like my sister’s paper dolls she used to play with. She was like cardboard. Her hair looked tired. In fact, she looked tired.
 
But I was glad Jimmy didn’t see Giggles. Then I panicked, my mouth turned dry. Maybe he hadn’t seen her glide like a lowered carucha down Brooklyn and Mednik.
 
“So, are any new girls waving at you?” I said, my mouth even drier now.
 
He looked at me like I said something in Chinese real fast.
 
“New girls?”
 
“Yeah, like hot off the comal?”
 
“What are you talking about?”
 
“Is Rachel still your, you know…?”
 
He nodded with a strange smile.
 
“I still like Rachel.”
 
I could breathe normal, again.
 
Jimmy’s sister whistled for him from away off. She had the loudest whistle in the Projects.
 
Jimmy ran off. I went back inside.
 
I played “Earth Angel” by the Penguins on my sister’s record player. I played it over and over. The title said what I wanted to sing to Giggles. Then I fell asleep on my sister’s cama. The record player needle was stuck on the end of the record.
 
“What are you doing?” my sister screamed, making me jump. My heart wanted to leave my chest and jump out the window to find somewhere better to live.
 
“Man,” I screamed back, “you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
 
“And I hate to fail. Now I’m really mad.” She got good grades in school. I think that’s why she said that. But she also had a big mouth my mother was always trying to slam shut.
 
Hearing my sister’s big mouth, my mother came running like my sister was on fire.
 
“¿Qué está pasando?” she screamed louder than even my sister.
 
“I have to wash everything,” my sister said, looking around the room like I spread pulgas all over.
 
“Don’t exaggerate,” my mother said.
 
“He’s a pestoso,” she screamed in her chavala voice so all the Projects could hear. I think all the people in the Projects were smelling the air.
 
My mother was quiet as if my sister said something like the president.
 
“I was only playing a record,” I said, explaining things to the judge, my mother.
 
Like a bailiff, my mother escorted me out of the room. My hermana had a crooked smile. The door slammed behind us. I would aim pedos into her room next time she wasn’t home.
 
To feel better, I went back outside. In the Projects you always ran into someone who either made you laugh or was madder than you.
 
Right now, it was Pete. He never made you laugh or mad. But he always had a problem to share. I tried telling him that was why he had a mother. That’s how they got gray hair.
 
But today, I think I caught him at a moment when people feel like unloading a problem on the first person they catch.
 
“Gordo,” he said, “I have a problem.”
 
“You’re the last bato I would guess had one.”
 
“What?”
 
“What happened?”
 
“I met the finest weesa ever made.”
 
“Ever?”
 
“Ever.”
 
“Why?”
 
“When you see her walk, it’s like seeing the ocean at Long Beach.”
 
“Go write a poem.” I said. It sounded like he was talking about Giggles and I didn’t want to hear.
 
“I have to win her heart first.”
 
Pete wasn’t a bad looking guy like some of the truly ugly ones around, but right now he looked like the ugliest feo of all time.
 
“I love Giggles,” he continued and I wanted to give him a Popeye-sized cachetada.
 
“Who is ‘Giggles’?” I said with a shaky voice. I was a nervous liar.
 
“She is a walking angel, like in the song, ‘Earth Angel’.” He said this with a stupid, faraway look.
 
“You okay?” he then said.
 
I felt mad then sick then mad again.
 
“Sure.”
 
“Are you sure-sure?”
 
“Sure.”
 
“My problem is that she is related to Jimmy and likes Loco.”
 
I sat on the sidewalk. I saw Loco’s crooked right eye. I think he hated the world and everyone in it because of that eye. He was born that way. God wanted him to look loco so he took the hint and became one.
 
“You look weird, man.”
 
“Why Loco?” I croaked.
 
“That’s what I want you to tell me. He is one ugly bato with an even uglier way with people.”
 
“And she is Jimmy’s cousin?”
 
He nodded weakly.
 
“How do you know that?”
 
“My sister.”
 
“Oh, yeah. Your sister Rosie talks with everyone about everyone. The Queen of Maravilla Chisme.”
 
“Hey, that’s my hermana.”
 
“Everyone knows Rosie, Pete.”
 
“Yeah, but you’re wise.”
 
All those times talking to Pete, I was mostly trying to get rid of him.
 
“So, what do you think?” he said. He wasn’t going nowhere till he got an answer.
 
“Loco has that name for a reason. Jimmy is probably thinking of a way to stop his prima from getting hooked up with him.”
 
I said that for myself.
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“He wants to stop him.”
 
“Oh.” I always liked hearing Pete say “Oh.” It meant he was accepting what I said and would go away. Not today.
 
“You know, Jimmy invited Loco to the show with Giggles?”
 
I lost my words and thinking.
 
Pete batted for me. “I saw them walking back to the Projects after they got off the Kern bus. Loco was laughing like a hyena.”
 
My mother said life has surprises. One just kicked me in the head.
 
“Should we jump him?” said Pete.
 
“He would wrap you around me like a pretzel.”
 
“So, what are you going to do?” he said.
 
What I wanted to do was pluck Loco’s good eye out and do a pachuco hop on it.
 
“It’s up to you.”
 
“Then what should I do?”
 
I felt like I was running his life when he should be running his own.
 
“Find another one.”
 
“Another what?”
 
“Chavala.”
 
“There ain’t no other around,” said Pete, looking around as if to prove it.
 
“All good times don’t lead to Giggles.”
 
At this point, I think I was again giving advice to myself.
 
“Yes they do.”
 
“What if she hates you? And your family? And your dog.”
 
“She don’t know me. Or my family. And this is the Projects, we can’t have a dog.”
 
“Maybe she has a drinking problem. She’ll start making ojitos at other batos.”
 
“How do you know she has a drinking problem?”
 
“Just looking at all angles.”
 
“She could wet her bed, chew food with her boca wide open, have a voice like Jimmy Durante, and I would still like her.”
 
“What if she has a record?”
 
“Even if she was serving life at juvie, I would still visit her every day.”
 
He was almost as crazy over her as I was.
 
“Don’t you have a girl you liked? What about Edith?”
 
“Edith was in the second grade. Her family moved out of the Projects when I was nine.”
 
“Too bad.”
 
“Huh?”

He looked at me real let down. He walked away.
 
I went and sat on my porch. I saw a girl coming toward me on the sidewalk. She was walking like a wave at Long Beach, like Pete said.
 
It was Giggles.
 
“Hello,” I said, trying to sound like some actor I heard in a movie.
 
She kept walking like I had been a squawking perico.
 
I was hoping for a “Hello” back or at least her head to turn up all conceited. But she kept walking.
 
But then for a little bit, she turned her head toward me. Not mad or happy.
 
Jimmy would make everything right. He would talk to his cousin and tell her that he and I were closer than gum under a zapato and she should grab me, crying.
 
Jimmy said that they were cousins when he came to the door.
 
“So, she just likes him like a cousin?” I said.
 
“She and Loco are closer than gum in your hair,” said Jimmy.
 
“So she likes him like a favorite cousin?”
 
“She likes him like she likes to kiss him.”
 
“That’s all?”
 
“He kisses her back.”
 
“You know Loco. You know what he’s like.”
 
“Since we were babies.”
 
I swallowed hard. Then I swallowed hard again. Then a third time and maybe a fourth.
 
“You look like you swallowed a moco,” he said.
 
“Why do you even know him?”
 
“He’s my step brother.” Jimmy didn’t even say that like he was sorry.
 
“Why?”
 
“I don’t make the rules. Loco’s dad married my mom years ago. My mom had kids. He had one, Loco.”
 
“So he can’t love Giggles?” I said.
 
“Why can’t he?”
 
“Because.”
 
“She is my cousin but she is nothing to Loco. Well, that could change, but that doesn’t keep them from liking, maybe loving each other and making a whole bunch of kids to spread around Maravilla.”
 
“That shouldn’t be allowed.”
 
“What?”
 
I walked away, stomping on the ground like it was Loco’s ugly ojo.
 
I went to Pete’s house to report.
 
He opened his door then smiled like if I was going to say that Giggles loved him.
 
I broke the news over his head. But it was my own cabeza that hurt.

by Armando Gonzalez

Fernando was in the living room, sitting on the couch and watching T.V. He was watching iCarly, a show he knew he would get made fun of for watching if he ever admitted this to others at school. Although he had already seen the episode where Carly finds out the cool, hot kid likes to collect peewee babies, he wanted to watch T.V. because he did not want to get a haircut.
 
He had done everything that morning very slowly. He took a slow shower and let his thoughts wander. He did this often, and liked doing this because in part it was relaxing, but he felt there was some other reason why he liked doing it but he could not figure out the reason. Of course, that morning when he took a shower, he really let his thoughts wander so far beyond himself that it was as if his mind was slowly leaving his body, so that when his thoughts eventually returned back to him, he felt like he was in someone else’s body that just so happened to be called Fernando. He would annoy parents when he did this, most particularly his father, who wanted to avoid using too much water for the fear that the landlord would tell him something. Since he always locked the door, his father would have to pick the door lock with something that looked like a small metal cane.
 
When he went inside, he would tell Fernando, “Cuando no vas usar el agua, apágalo.”
 
Fernando would just say, “Okay.”
 
Fernando had done everything he had to do that morning. He had even brushed his teeth. Now he just had to leave the house, go over to the beauty salon that was about a block away, and get a haircut.
 
His mother, who was in the kitchen washing dishes, began to call him, “¿Fernando, qué hora es?”
 
“Son las tres.”
 
“Ya se está haciendo tarde. Vete a la peluquería antes que tu papá venga, o se va a enojar.”
 
“Okay, okay.”
 
He went into the kitchen where he knew the semi-wrinkled ten dollar bill would be, waiting for him on the kitchen table. He picked it up and looked at it. He looked at Alexander Hamilton’s hair, which was a wig, but Fernando was unaware of this. Although he didn’t really like the way Hamilton’s hair looked, Fernando was jealous because his hair looked longer than his. He wondered for a short time why it was that men back then were able to have long hair but now had to have short hair.
 
He said goodbye to his mother and started heading over to the beauty salon, slowly walking. But it didn’t matter how slow he walked because it took little to no time to reach the beauty salon. He stood in front of the beauty salon and hesitated to enter. He touched the tips of his bangs. It wasn’t long or anything, about medium length size to be exact, but it got long enough for his father to tell him to get a haircut. He knew that he would have to get a very short haircut and would be angry the whole day. He also knew that if he didn’t get the haircut, his father would get angry at him and would force him to get one. It didn’t seem like there was any room for compromise. He did not like fighting with anyone, especially grownups. He felt adults for the most part knew more than him, but sometimes he felt adults were just as clueless as him.
 
He finally went inside and went towards the glass counter. On the glass counter there was a yellow legal pad with a list of names crossed out and others that were not. It was the sign-in sheet. He picked up the black pen next to the yellow legal pad and wrote his name.
 
Fernando walked towards a chair and sat down. It was a Saturday, a popular day to get a haircut, and just after noon, so the wait was going to be a little longer. In the beauty salon were mothers who had brought their children to get a haircut, one that was presumably going to be short. He saw men there, too. They looked like they were by themselves and all had short haircuts. The men who sat in the beauty styling chairs were getting their hair cut and looked like they enjoyed having short hair. Some of the hairdressers, who were mostly women, had a variety of haircuts. Some of them had long hair, medium hair, and even short hair. Some of them even had their hair bleached or dyed another color like red.
 
There was one gay hairdresser, or at least he appeared so. Fernando noticed that most men, if they were not in any kind of hurry, did their best to avoid having their hair cut by him. His father told him once, after he had his hair cut done by the gay hairdresser, that he thought that that man was weird.
 
The beauty salon had gotten more packed since he walked in, and now every chair was taken. With so many people the hair salon had now gotten hotter. One of the hairdressers went to turn the air conditioner on, but it was going to take time for the place to cool down. Fernando decided it was probably better to wait outside, even if there was a chance he would not hear his name called out. He just wanted to get out.
 
Fernando got up from his chair and waited outside. There were two men standing outside, too. He leaned against the wall of the beauty salon and as usual began to get lost in his own head. Across the street was the field of the middle school he would soon attend next year. From what he understood from movies, middle school was usually not a great time for most kids. He wondered what he would be like when he was in middle school. He had typical middle school self-conscious thoughts: Would he be popular or unpopular? Cool or uncool? Outgoing or shy? Smart or dumb? Funny or unfunny? Interesting or boring? Mysterious or unmysterious? Handsome or ugly?
 
Regardless of these thoughts, Fernando fantasized about having a good time. He was also getting to that age when he started to notice girls sexually and how he liked being around them a lot more than most boys. He thought of having a girlfriend, but then he wished he had not thought of this because he did not know whether he was fit to get one. He felt boyfriends had to be strong enough to get into fights. He did not feel he was this kind of strong.
 
Maybe I am strong in other ways, he thought.
 
Just then a hairdresser opened the door.
 
“¿Está Fernando aquí?”
 
The two men looked at the hairdresser. Then the two men and the hairdresser looked at Fernando. Since he was lost in his own thoughts, it took him a couple seconds to register what was going on.
 
“¿Qué?” said Fernando.
 
“¿Usted es Fernando?”
 
He was about to say yes when the thought of being strong in other ways occurred to him. In the moment he was driven by emotions instead of reason.
 
“No.”
 
The hairdresser said okay and went back inside.
 
Fernando immediately regretted what he had done. His heart was beating fast. He tried to calm himself down and thought of going back inside and telling the hairdresser that he had misheard, that he was in fact Fernando. But he was too ashamed to do even that. In reality, there was nothing to worry about. If he had simply gone back inside and told the hairdresser that he was in fact Fernando, she would most likely think nothing of it. But this was a big deal to him, as it was the first time he had ever truly done something for himself.
 
As if he was no longer in control of himself, Fernando’s legs began to slowly walk away from the beauty salon. 

***

He was walking on a sidewalk, unsure of where he was going or what he was doing. He came to a crosswalk and pressed on the traffic light button. As he stood there waiting for the white walking man sign to come up, he began to think where he should go. All he knew was that he did not want to go back to the beauty salon or home.
 
Am I running away? Fernando thought. No, I can’t be running away. I have nowhere to go. I only have ten dollars…But it feels like I am running away.
 
The white walking man sign came up. Fernando walked to the other side of the street. While he thought about where he should be going, he mindlessly walked straight ahead, as if turning right or left would be wrong or be too much effort.
 
He arrived in a part of the city where there were many homeless people on the sidewalk. Some of them were either sleeping on a piece of cardboard or a mattress. Others were leaning against the wall of a dollar general store, thinking who knows what. It did not matter if one wanted to walk to the other side of the street because they would be there as well. Fernando had no choice but to walk on another street in order to avoid them altogether. He decided to take a right.
 
But even when he made a deliberate effort to avoid them, he saw one coming his way. He was a lanky homeless man with a blond and entangled, stiff beard. He had long blonde hair that looked like it had not been washed for days. Fernando wondered what his parents thought of his having long hair. He was shirtless but had a shirt hung around his neck like a shemagh. Fernando tried hard not to make eye contact with him. When the man finally got next to Fernando, he asked him if he had any change. He smelled extremely sour, so it was hard for Fernando not to make a disgusted reaction.
 
For a split second Fernando thought about giving the ten dollars to the homeless man because he felt sorry for him. He remembered what his father told him about homeless people, that they were all lazy people who didn’t want to work. He decided against giving the homeless man the ten dollars. Maybe if he had a dollar he would have given it to him. 
 
Fernando shook his head. The homeless man, with a blank expression, said nothing and walked away.
 
Eventually the sidewalk ended and he was now facing a street divider, which to him almost felt as if it was demanding Fernando to make a choice, to either go left or right. Since he still had no idea where he should go, he thought it best to go somewhere where he can rest so he can think about it better. To his right he saw a McDonald’s. He thought McDonald’s would be a good place to rest and walked towards it.
 
In the McDonald’s he walked towards a table near a window and sat there. Once again, Fernando had to think about what he was doing.
 
Do I ever plan to go home? he thought. I know I have to go home at some point. But I still haven’t gotten a haircut. I know my father will get angry with me and probably force me to get one. There is still time to go to the hair salon to get a haircut. As long as I come back home with shorter hair I don’t think my parents will care too much if I come home late. 
 
Fernando looked out the window for a while, staring at nothing in particular. He understood the simple fact that boys were supposed to have short hair and girls were supposed to have long hair, but at the same time he did not understand.
 
So what if I do have longer hair? It’s not the end of the world.
 
He touched his bangs.
 
Why does it matter so much to my father that what I am touching is a little long?
 
For some reason, Fernando had the strange feeling that someone was staring at him. He looked up and noticed that a woman, who was sitting with a man and two boys, and was a table away from Fernando, was staring at him. He assumed she was the mother of the children and the man sitting next to him was her husband and the father of the children. When Fernando made eye contact with the mother, she looked quickly away. Fernando thought nothing of this. But he then noticed other people, other parents, and even the cashier, were giving him stares too, as if he was strange looking. Their stares creeped Fernando out.
 
Do they know I didn’t get my haircut? he thought despite knowing how such a thought was nonsense.
 
Then he knew why. He was the only child in the McDonald’s who was all by himself. The other children were probably with parents or an older relative. Fernando thought maybe they thought he was homeless and was perhaps watching other people eat, although he did not exactly have the look of a homeless child. He felt his face grow a little hot. He wanted to leave as soon as possible. But, as soon as he got up to leave, he felt his stomach grumble. He was hungry. He remembered he had a ten dollar bill. His hands trembled as he took the ten dollar bill out of his right pocket. There was Hamilton once again with his long and white wig. This was the bill he was given to get a haircut, but now he was thinking of using it to buy something to eat at McDonald’s.
 
At first he was reluctant, but he realized that as long as he did not spend more than five dollars, he would still have plenty of money to get a haircut because it was exactly five dollars. But he wondered what his parents would think when he didn’t give them any of the change back.
 
I can say that after I got my haircut, I got the sudden urge to eat something at McDonald’s, thought Fernando. He figured it was such a simple reason that the worst that could possibly happen is his parents telling him he should have let them know before he went.
 
Fernando went to the cashier and ordered himself two cheeseburgers and a meal. It was $4.89. He now had $5.11. Just enough to still get a haircut. He ate his two cheeseburgers and fries and small coke without feeling too much guilt.
 
After he was done eating, he decided it was probably time to go home. If he still wanted to get a haircut, it was his last chance, that is, if he did not want to be dragged by his own father to the beauty salon. Images of his father yelling at him and grabbing him by the shoulders formed in his mind. He no longer hit Fernando, but nevertheless, he was still afraid of him. Even though he knew others would find this a little silly, to Fernando, yelling and hitting almost felt like the same thing. He asked someone in the McDonald’s for the time and she told him it was about to be three. He started to feel anxious again. He walked quickly out of the McDonald’s and planned on going back to the beauty salon. 

***

He stood in front of the beauty salon. The place was much more packed with people since it was now later in the afternoon. He entered again, this time with shame, and avoided eye contact with any of the hairdressers that might have seen him enter the first time. When he walked towards the counter and looked at the names written on the yellow legal pad, he saw his own name was crossed out. He wrote his name on the yellow legal pad again.
 
He looked around to see if there were any empty seats. He saw one, but it was between two seats that were occupied with people, an older man with a grown out buzz cut to the left and an older woman to the right with a long ponytail.
 
When he went to sit down on the chair, he noticed how fast his heart was beating. He started to wonder what his parents were thinking. The thought formed in his head that his mom was probably thinking why their son was taking so long to get a haircut. He could picture his mother being worried at the moment and his father either driving home from work or having just arrived home. He could picture his worried mother telling his father that Fernando had not come home. His father would most likely get furious. “¿Cómo que no ha llegado? La peluquería está muy cortita.”
 
He was shaking now. He wanted to get his haircut right away. The walls to his right had pictures of men with combovers, tapers, undercuts, buzz cuts, short spiky hair, spiky quiffs, fades, etc. He didn’t even bother to look at any of them because he thought maybe if he got the shortest haircut that his father would not be so mad at him.
 
“Fernando,” a hairdresser called his name.
 
Fernando stood up immediately and walked over to the hairdresser that called his name. Luckily she was not the same hairdresser that called him the first time, or that would have been embarrassing. The hairdresser was a short, skinny Mexican woman who had a pixie haircut with highlights. She led him to the stylist chair. He sat down and looked at himself in the mirror. He had an overgrown hairstyle and, at most, his fringe barely passed his eyebrows. He secretly wanted to have long and flamboyant hair like a male anime character.
 
Only after the hairdresser put the hair cloth on Fernando did she ask him: “¿Cómo quieres tu pelo?”
 
Although he was feeling anxious before about his dad yelling at him if he arrived home late and without a haircut, Fernando did not respond right away. The hairdresser stared at him and asked him again.
 
Fernando told her to give him a short haircut, a number four on all sides.  
 
Just then, his father came into the beauty salon. Fernando could feel someone staring at him, hard, to his left and turned to see his dad standing near the entrance. His father, while looking noticeably angry at Fernando for taking such a long time to get a simple haircut, at the same time had an expression on his face of approval. He walked over to where Fernando was seated.
 
“¿La lista de gente era larga?”
 
Fernando nodded his head.
 
“¿Qué tipo de corte de pelo vas a agarrar?”
 
“Un número cuatro en todos lados.”
 
“Eso está bueno.”
 
Fernando just looked straight ahead and said nothing.
 
“Voy a estar sentado. ¿Okay?”
 
Fernando nodded again.
 
The hairdresser reached into a counter drawer for the hair clippers and turned it on. As soon as he heard the buzz, Fernando went stiff, and suddenly he remembered once again what he had told himself earlier in the day which made him run away for a short while: Maybe I am strong in other ways.
 
When the hair clippers got near his hair, he moved his head away, which surprised the hairdresser.
 
From where he was seated, he heard his father yell “¡Fernando, quédate quieto!”
 
Fernando did not listen. Without having to think about it, he got off his chair and made a run for the door. When he got near the door, his father, who was so caught off guard by what was happening, had to register what was going on, and because of this, he had lost a second or two that would have enabled him to grab Fernando. This resulted in his father’s failure to catch Fernando, as he only managed to snatch the hair cloth off him.
 
He ran as fast as he could without ever looking back. His father kept calling out his name. Without looking both ways, Fernando ran across the street to the middle school’s chain link fence. Cars honked at him and the wheels of cars screeched on the pavement and people yelled things at him, mostly in Spanish. He did not have a second to think where he was going to turn when he got near the chain link fence. He turned right. Soon after he made the turn, he almost ran into a short Mexican lady selling flowers to cars. He kept running straight ahead. He no longer heard his father calling out his name. Either he was too focused on chasing him or he had stopped chasing him.
 
Now I’m going to get it, Fernando thought. 

***

About an hour or so had passed since he last ran away from the beauty salon. He was back to running away, except now it felt much more official. Whereas before he was scared enough of his father to return back to the hair salon, now he was too scared to even go back home. He had no idea what he was going to do now. All he had in mind was to be as far away as possible from his home.
 
By now he was walking by the Santa Ana riverbed. He stopped walking and looked down at the riverbed, which was bone dry. He decided to walk down the riverbed, where he could hide easily and sit down in some shade under the overpass. There was a homeless person sleeping at the very bottom of the riverbed and using a black backpack as a pillow. He had a blanket, coated with some dirt, wrapped around himself. Fernando made sure to avoid stepping on any broken glass bottles or any sharp object. The place smelled like piss and shit. Fernando sat down on an incline. And once he did, he realized just how tired he felt. Altogether, he had been practically walking the whole day, and because he felt very tired, he thought of absolutely nothing. For about half an hour he simply listened to the cars pass him from above. Occasionally people on bikes would pass by him and some would look at him with a concerned face.
 
Despite how dirty and smelly the place was, just listening to nearby sounds and sitting underneath the overpass was extremely peaceful for Fernando. It was something he didn’t know he needed.
 
However, he got the sudden urge to take a massive dump. The McDonald’s had finally wanted out. He had about three options: he could go back home, find a nearby place with a restroom, or take a dump where he currently was. Fernando knew he was too tired to walk long distances, so the first option was out. Besides, he didn’t want to face his father, at least not yet. He wanted to do everything he could to avoid the last option so he tried hard to think of restrooms that were nearby. He noticed there was a park next to the riverbed, so he figured that was probably his best option.
 
He walked slowly to the park so as to not let the poop come out. He got near a lake in the park which smelled of duck poop and saw a young looking couple sitting on a bench and thought about asking them where the nearest restroom was. Once he got closer, he realized it was two women who were sitting very close to each other, almost like they could kiss each other on the lips at any moment. Fernando was slightly uncomfortable when he saw them, but at the same time he didn’t really care if it was two women who were sitting so close to each other, he needed help, so it didn't matter who it came from. Also, by this time he really had to  go to the restroom and had no time to be picky. When he got near them, he said, “Excuse me.”
 
Both women turned their heads around to look at him. They appeared to be hispanic. The one on the right was wearing a septum piercing. Fernando noticed that they smelled like something but couldn’t identify what exactly the smell was though. For him, it neither smelled good or bad. He noticed their eyes were very red, too. He had never smelled marijuana before. They also didn’t look like those kinds of women, the kind to get close to other women. They had long hair, wore tight jeans and both spoke in feminine voices. In a few words, they basically looked and sounded like normal women.
 
“Hi,” the one sitting on the right said. Both smiled and laughed a little more than was necessary. They seemed pleasantly surprised to see a child, all by himself, approach them.
 
“Do you guys know where the nearest restroom is?”
 
Both had to think for a few seconds. Then the one on the right pointed with her finger in a direction and said: “If you keep going that way, you will see a dirt track. There is a public restroom right next to it.”
 
“Thank you.”
 
As Fernando walked over to the public restroom, he heard the two women talking silently and laughing. They were probably talking about him.
 
Once he saw the dirt track, it was easy to find the public restroom. When he entered the public restroom, he noticed there were no doors for the toilet. There was just a wall to cover yourself on one side and that was it. He was scared that someone might walk in on him while he was taking a shit, but he had no time to worry about that, so he walked over to the toilet and sat down and did his business. He wasted no time.
 
After he was finished, it dawned on him that, once again, he had no idea what to do next. He figured he needed to find a place to sit down and think for a little, just like he had done when he was at McDonald's. He saw a ledge nearby and walked towards it to sit down, which was in front of the dirt track. He watched people jog. When he noticed how golden the people’s skin appeared, he realized that it was soon going to be dark. It was going to be dangerous for an early adolescent like him to walk the streets during the night when different kinds of people came out. He thought about how this might be his first time ever walking in the dark.
 
Fernando’s stomach rumbled. He was getting hungry again. The thought of buying food with the five dollars he had occurred to him. If anything was going to force him back home, it was going to be food.
 
Suddenly, the idea of buying a bus pass occurred to him. He remembered that he passed by a bus stop near the riverbed. He knew the one-day bus pass cost five dollars from the times he took the bus with his mom to places like the pediatrician when his father could not take them. If he took the bus he would definitely be able to get home before it got fully dark.
 
He walked over to the bus stop. When he got there he noticed that there was no one sitting on the bus bench. He chose not to sit down because he did not want anyone to sit next to him, especially since it was getting late.
 
It didn’t take long for the bus to arrive. When he saw the bus coming he saw on top of it bright orange letters which read “Golden West Transp Center.” He took the five dollars out of his pocket before the bus pulled up next to him. For a second he thought how it was a little funny that the money he was given was used for anything but a haircut. Who knew what his father would do to him when he arrived home with no money at all? At this point though, Fernando was tired and hungry and just wanted to get home, so he sort of didn’t care what his father did to him anymore. It was a bit of an amazing feeling, to not care at all anymore, he thought.
 
The bus pulled up next to him, the doors opened, and he got in. He inserted his five dollars into the fare box. He felt like the bus driver was staring at him, but he chose to ignore this feeling. Few people were on the bus. He sat on the seat all the way in the back on the right side of the bus, which was right next to the window. When he looked out the window, his mind wandered. He had many thoughts, and they went deeper than usual, almost like he was at home showering again. He expanded on a thought he had earlier, which was why his father wanted him to get a haircut so badly. Of course, he was not a stupid child. He obviously knew that his father wanted him to have shorter hair so that he looked more like a boy than a girl. But what amazed him is the fact that this simple thing of having longer hair, which was really nothing to get upset over, was something that made his dad uncomfortable, like he was a child like him, who was uncomfortable with the dark.
 
Although he felt that he was becoming less and less scared of his own father, he still wanted to avoid a harsh clash with him, as hopeless as that sounded.
 
What can I say to my father? Fernando questioned himself. How can I convince him that there is nothing wrong with a boy who wishes to have longer hair?
 
The bus was getting close to Main street, where he knew he had to get off. He thought of staying on the bus until he knew what to say to his father. Fernando thought and thought, but it seemed like there was just nothing he could say to convince his father that long hair was just as good as short hair, regardless of whether you were a boy or a girl. He knew his father was a very stubborn man and wanted things his way. He vowed to himself to never be like his own father.
 
He pulled on the yellow string to get off at the bus stop on Main street. As the bus stop wasn’t that far away from his home, he decided to walk the rest of the way home.
 
The walk home was a quiet one. He did not walk fast. There didn’t seem to be any good reason to do so other than to make his parents worry one less minute. He couldn’t imagine his father being worried about him at the same time being angry at him. He just couldn’t for some reason.
 
As he walked home, he passed by a church called Saint Anne’s. He looked at the bell tower and wondered what it was like to ring the bell. Fernando was not very religious, but he was not entirely against religion either. He had some questions about religion, whether one needed religion to be happy. Anytime he had a question like this, his mother always insisted that you did need religion to be happy, as if this wasn't obvious enough to Fernando that any free moment she had, his mother would devote that time to praying. Or when his mother would be in the kitchen cooking dinner, meanwhile she would have her phone on the kitchen table playing loudly some YouTube video of a catholic priest giving a sermon. In stark contrast to his father, his mother was a lot gentler and timid. He remembered once he asked her what it was that made her want to marry his father. Besides some other characteristics, the first thing that came to her mind was that he was a very hard worker. Fernando wasn’t sure if being a hard worker was something he liked enough in a person to want to want to marry them, but he understood.
 
He was now standing below the green Old Mcfadden and Main street sign. In just a few more steps he would be home. He stood below the street sign for a few minutes, getting himself prepared for his parent’s reaction. It was eight thirty p.m. Once again, his heart was beating fast. All kinds of thoughts about his father were going through his head. It was easy not to care when he was away, but now that he was a lot closer to his home, all his worries came back to him and he felt the tension in his shoulders, as if someone were squeezing them.
 
He started walking. He was scared but he continued to walk. As he got closer to the front window, he saw lights coming through a gap in the curtains. They were home. He walked up the red steps towards the black steel door and knocked on the metal screen. He heard footsteps. The knob of the door turned, the door swung open and before him stood his father. 

***

The next day he was at the beauty salon again, this time with his father standing by his side. His father did not say anything to him when he arrived home. But the next morning he gave him a short, but assertive and even threatening sounding lecture.
 
“Ese si quieres quedarte en esta casa, necesitas obedecer lo que te digo que hacer. No quiero que vuelvas a correr porque solo te digo que te cortes el pelo.”
 
“Pero nada más es pelo.”
 
“¿Ese nada más es pelo, por qué no te lo cortas?”
 
Fernando only nodded his head and said okay, making little to no eye contact. His mother stood by, saying nothing.
 
“Vamas ir al peluquería. ¿Estás listo?”
 
He nodded his head.
 
So there they were again, in the beauty salon. His father told the hairdresser to give him a number three on all sides of his head.
 
“Por fin ya se va a cortar el pelo,” the hairdresser said.
 
“Sí, ya era tiempo.”
 
Both the hairdresser and his father chuckled. Fernando did not chuckle.
 
The hairdresser took the hair clippers out of the drawer and started. It was an easy haircut and of course no scissors were needed. It didn’t really matter where she started. She started on the top. Fernando saw his father in the mirror, with his arms folded, and with a satisfied look. He could have killed his father right there and then. He had all the necessary emotions boiling inside of him. 

Armando Gonzalez was born in Santa Ana, California and continues to live there. His parents migrated from Mexico and met here and married. He has no schooling in creative writing, and “Haircut” is his first published story. He is Mexican American/Chicano. 

by Olga Vilella

​It happened sin darse cuenta apenas. One minute, Josefina Corrada was the exceptional mujer she had always been. A responsible professional. Puntal of the eight o'clock Mass de San Aloishús, even in the worst snowstorm in February. A mother who never disappointed. And the next day, she consigned everybody to hell.
 
“Se me van a hacer puñetas, todos. Y el que me esconda las llaves, me va a oír.”
 
Which is how she came to be waiting for Dr. Haddad, that day. Maybe she should send la familia that funny meme of the cat. Pa’l carajo…a mí nadie me manda. Even Joey, the only among her relatives she could stand these days. But el guaifi seemed to be down.
 
Certainly not to Josie, there was no reasoning with Josie lately. When Josefina thought of her eldest, she had to ask los cielos what sin was she paying for in this life, to have been saddled with such an ingrate of a daughter. Who never called, unless she needed something. Trite, trite, and verging on the caricature, but oh-so-true.
 
A flash of memory sparked in Josefina's mind. She blinked then, assaulted by a draught of icy air and un recuerdo. The pinkie finger in Josie’s left hand, curved slightly inward. The dedo that was a replica of her own. And then she closed the screen pa'quick. No thinking of la Josie. La que me va a armar cuándo se entere.
 
Swipe screen left. Not for anything Josefina was the only one among her friends that Twittered and Instagrammed and Facebooked and TikToked. A brief smile lifted the corner of her perfectly drawn mouth!--Cherris-in-de-esnow de Reblon—with the next image popping up in her head. A circle of silvery heads, jostling around, whenever she showed las amigas how to get on? in?—maldito inglés—social media. Yet again.
 
A small whoosh brought her back to her surroundings. Another blast of frigid air fell on her shoulders from above, like a shower at Varadero Beach Club, on a morning in August. Dios mío, ese aire acondicionado me va a matar de pulmonía. Y esta camilla.
 
A little face, all eyes, peered then from around the curtain of the cubicle. An orangey tube—¡cómo el presidente!—was poised firmly between his lips and a bag dangled from a grubby paw. ¡Un Chito! Food from the gods. Now forbidden by Josie. The sight made her stomach rumble, not for the first time. Josefina tried her nicest smile. Kids usually responded to her abuela charm, but this one was not parting with one curly bit.
 
El niñito left quickly, but the curtain of the cubicle had parted long enough for Mrs. Cou-rra-dah to catch a glimpse of a group in scrubs planted around the nurses’ station. Call me “mom” one more time, anda. See what’s going to happen to you, mija. Will you look at the size of those culos? People are really unattractive these days.
 
“Body shaming, grandma.” “Don’t call her china, grandma, she’s Korean.” The list of her many social sins clacked like dominoes in her memory. Swipe definitely left.
 
But Joey’s gently reproachful face, a caramel Mater Admirablilis, refused to budge, once invoked. “Grandma, be nice. I love you, but be nice. Te quiero mucho,” repeated to signal no bad intent, pronounced in that cute gringuita accent of hers.
 
Joey, tan bella, mi niña. Joey qué no salió a su mamá, that’s for sure. “If those people are Italian, I’m china. Coreana,” Josefina spurted out loud, almost choking, on a breathy yelp.
 
Look at the time, caballero. Deja, que estos van a trinar cuando yo termine con el presidente del hospital. ¡A mí! Qué me hagan esperar a mí, Josefina Corrada, la primera doctora hispana de Jersi Sity.
 
But the memory of her granddaughter’s brown eyes still hovered, stubbornly, before her. It was getting late. And Josefina was so tired. And more shook up than she had thought when the car stopped spinning. Tired, hungry, in need of reviving. “Latte with an extra shot,” she heard Joey order in that papery hoarse voice of hers. Even Joey, even her.
 
“Un café con leche, mijo. Cargadito.” These days, saying those words, en español, felt like an act of resistance. En español, like it or not. Café con leche. Y tu MAGA que te la metes por dónde no te da el sol. Besides, calling out for a café con leche at el Estarboc also conveyed, loudly she hoped, what she thought of people willing to pay más de cinco pesos for a latte. Café con leche, guanajos.
 
“Well, dear heart. It is a fallen world,” as Catalina always repeated, while dusting her bolster of a chest. She knew las niñas would worry about her when she didn’t show up. But she was also sure they went ahead and ate. At this point in their lives, not one of her friends was going to delay ordering lunch because one of them didn’t show up. They would never eat.
 
Maldita vejez. ¿Quién te prepara para esto? ¡Nadie! As if there were any medical textbooks that could prepare you for the indignities of old age.
 
The carefully calibrated contempt in the voice of los jóvenes at the cellphone store. The looks of disdain when you don't put away your wallet fast enough. As if they were never getting old. As if. As if. That movie with la rubita de Beberli Jills. How they had laughed, she and Joey, escapadas, both of them. “No PG-13 movies for her until she's old enough, mom.” As if Joey didn't hear worse every day in school, so guanaja.
 
I wonder what's taking Dr. Haddad so long. Had she been in her right mind, she would have refused the ride to the ER. What had she done instead? Let them wheel her, in while making un chistesito. And not even a good one. “What happened to la ambulancia de los guapitos?” At least, one of them—dominicano by the looks of him—had laughed. “Lady, that's the next crew. And they won't be here for a while.”
 
“You think you’re really funny, don't you, abuela?” As a matter of fact, yes, she thought she was pretty funny. Even Joey turned on her these days.
 
For nearly seventy years, she had been a good girl. Not anymore. ¡Se acabó! She was now primed for war. Ready a dar guerra like the warrior she had once been. The buena hija who told her father she was going to medical school during that lunch, so, so many years ago. Dios mío, cómo se puso, loco furioso.
 
Contrarian, contrarian, cómo eres, Enrique used to say. The faces from other days of conflict crowded the small space around the gurney. Her father hitting the lunch table with a fist, the afternoon she told him Enrique was coming to talk to him. Certainly, she was marrying him. And she was moving to La Habana con él. Y mamá, llora que llora. Why couldn't she understand? She left México con papá.
 
Igualitica, igualitica que tu padre, Enrique used to say. David Juño, cerrado cómo un puño. The man who refused to ever go to el paseo once the war was finally over. “Cara al sol/con la camisa abieeeertaaaaa.” Somebody would intone the anthem of the Nacionales in the middle of la Alameda and the crowd would pause, as if paralyzed. Shifty eyes taking note. Black shirts and a sea of raised hands, saluting. An arm lifted, stiff like a gravestone, like el Caudillo's, meeting Hitler in Hendaya.
 
Not that don David had any use for the other side. Not after what they had written on the doors of the apartment building in Madrid. “Muerte al dueño de este edificio.” And Lelia's daughter dying during the siege. She died of a pneumonia, they said. We knew it was hunger.
 
“Recuerda, Pepiña. En este pared, unos españoles asesinaron a otros españoles.” Y el hambre por todos lados. As many maids as any house would want, to be had for a pair of alpargatas and their keep, during those years of darkness. Niñas, niñas todas. And then the years of that other war. Grey uniforms, all over the city. The whole of the province, all of Galicia, was overrun by them. On leave from the German submarine base in El Ferrol, la tata Rosalía would whisper, moving away from their Nordic raptor eyes. And Amelia, all blonde trenzas and blue eyes, pretending she was a refugee. “Kinder, kinder, schokolade.” After all these years, those words remained fresh in her memory, as bittersweet as the taste of that chocolate long gone.
 
Better make sure next time Joey took her to el Cosco she bought enough garbanzos. And a big bag of those small Esniqers.
 
“My dear colleague, what is this I hear about you still driving?” El doctorcito Haddad. Here we go....

A native of Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Olga Vilella is currently at work revising Los que llegaron, a historical novel based on the unsuccessful attack by the English to San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1797, a work that seeks to upend Caribbean notions of race, religion, and ethnicity. 

by Kim Vázquez

Flora didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have because she was suddenly startled awake by someone calling her name. “Flora.” She heard it again and looked around. It sounded like her brother’s voice calling out to her, but that was impossible. He had been dead for over thirty years.
 
Voices drifted down from the roof where the rest of her family was watching the sunset. And Flora put her hand on her chest, forcing herself to relax. That’s all it was, her family calling to her. Her mind was playing tricks on her, making her believe she heard her brother’s voice.
 
Flora looked over at the stairs that led to the roof. Maybe she should have gone up there after dinner. One of her favorite things was sitting with her son and grandchildren to watch the sunset. And if she were with them now, she wouldn’t be sitting here thinking she had heard the voice of a ghost.
 
But she had been tired and wanted to relax on the couch and enjoy the warm evening breeze. Besides, she had seen enough sunsets in her life. At ninety-six, she earned the right to do what she wanted. Flora had spent her whole life working hard, and she was tired, so tired. And that’s what she told her son earlier when he tried to insist that she join them on the roof.
 
“Flora, vente.” She heard it again. It was louder this time. She wasn’t half-asleep, and she was almost positive that it was Antonio’s voice. “Except he’s dead,” she told herself.
 
The setting sun streamed through the large wooden doors that led to the balcón, and a memory of Antonio waiting for her came with it. He was in front of the house on Luna Street where they had grown up and sounded a little annoyed as he called out for her to hurry. Papá was forcing him to take Flora with him and his friends to the movies, and he was not to let her out of his sight.
 
Papá always made Antonio take Flora with him. Antonio might not have liked it too much, but Flora loved it. And as she ran down the stairs to meet him, she smiled. After the movie, she would get him to take her for ice cream.
 
Antonio complained, “Te tardastes mucho.” He told Flora she was slow and he didn’t like being late. But he always said the same thing. Then Antonio would smile. And it was always the same sly smile like he knew something that she didn’t, a secret she would love.
 
The sun had almost set, its light was a deep orange, and it covered everything in its glow. Flora felt almost like she was in a dream as she pushed herself up and stepped onto the balcón. She wanted to see where that voice calling out to her was coming from even though she was half-blind and wouldn’t be able to see too far.
 
Sure enough, there was no one on the street. Flora was sure of it, and she wasn’t surprised.
 
“Inventos míos,” she mumbled under her breath, and for a second, she wondered if she was starting to lose her mind. Or maybe she was just tired. She had been tired a lot more lately. She also had been thinking about the past a lot more.
 
That’s what it was, Flora told herself. She was letting her memories get to her. She took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she told herself to leave the past behind, where it belongs. Those times are over and gone. She headed back to the couch, then looked up at the ceiling and said a little prayer just in case she was losing her mind. “Que sea lo que Dios quiere,” she mumbled.
 
“Mami, ¿estás bien?” She heard her son call out from upstairs.
 
“Sí,” she called back. “I’m just tired,” she thought to herself as she grabbed one of the throw pillows she had made off the couch next to her. A thread was loose, and she tried to see where it was coming from but couldn’t make it out. Maybe tomorrow she’d sit at the sewing machine and fix it. She hadn’t done any sewing in a while because of her lousy eyesight.
 
And that was a shame because sewing was her lifelong trade. Gracias a Dios, she had learned one. It saved her when her husband took off with another woman, leaving Flora alone and afraid in New York to raise two young boys by herself. But none of that mattered now. It was over. She had survived and had even come back to Puerto Rico.
 
Flora stretched her legs out. She should go to bed, but her exhaustion was overpowering. She felt it in her bones. Besides, a part of her enjoyed the warm breeze coming in from the balcón. It made her feel safe and comfortable. There was always a lovely warm ocean breeze that made its way down Luna Street in the evening, and she had loved it since she was a child.
 
She closed her eyes and felt her body relax. Just then, her brother’s voice called out again. This time she jumped up quickly and practically ran to the balcón. She surprised herself with how fast she was able to move. She looked out at the street and saw a man standing below. He waved at her. And he seemed familiar, but she couldn’t see his face clearly.
 
“Flora vente.” The man called out, and Flora was sure that it was Antonio’s voice.
 
The man waved, and Flora stood frozen to the balcón’s handrail. She had a feeling in her chest that made her want to go downstairs and see the man, but a voice in her head was telling her not to go.
 
Flora decided to ignore the voice in her head and go with the feeling in her chest. She called out to her son, “Vengo ya,” and rushed out the front door. Usually, Flora held onto the handrail tightly as she made her way down the stairs, but this time it was almost like she was a kid again. Her steps were steady and confident. She smiled and went faster.
 
Flora stepped onto the sidewalk and looked around for the man, half expecting him to be gone. He stood on the corner and waved to her. She squinted, trying to see him clearly. A breeze made its way down Luna Street and brushed against her skin. She felt refreshed, almost invigorated. The tiredness she had been feeling before was gone.
 
He was leaning against the wall waiting for her just like he used to do. The closer she got to him, the clearer her vision. He had the same angular face she remembered, and his hair was dark and messy.
 
Antonio smiled at her, “Por fin llegastes.” And it was the same smile he had always had. Like he knew a great secret that Flora was going to love.
 
Flora stopped and looked up at him. “¿Cómo? How are you here?”
 
His eyes sparkled like she remembered, “I was waiting for you. Te tardastes mucho.” She smiled at him and felt the tears filling her eyes. It felt like he had never left.
 
“Vente,” Antonio held his arm out so she could grab ahold of it, and she looped her arm through his.
 
“Mami, ¿estás bien? Flora heard her son’s voice calling out to her. It sounded so far away. She turned to look behind her and felt an ache in her heart.
 
Antonio looked down at her and patted her hand to reassure her. She nodded, “Que sea lo que Dios quiere.”
 
Then she turned back and smiled. She was ready for her walk on Luna Street.

Kim Vázquez grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to New York to study Dramatic Writing at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. The lack of representation and diversity in children's books drove her to write a middle-grade Latinx mystery that she is currently querying while she works on another. She's had various articles curated and published on Medium, including “Green Plantains and Memories of mi Isla” and “An Afternoon in la Plaza del Mercado.” She's also had a short story, “The Lady in White,” published by the Acentos Review.

I was sitting in my favorite easy chair, rocking back and forth to some firme rolas, thinking about the Dodgers, my next meal and the llantas my ’64 Chevy Impala needed. I looked over to Tío Juan who was sitting on the hardest chair in the house and in the same room, which is our sala. I share it with the old bato who helps pay la renta. I knew he saved a lot of money, only spending a lot of feria for books. In fact, he was reading one, lost in some thought from some writer who lived back before gente had TV, laptops and iPhones. Half the people now living would go crazy if they had to live only with those three toys. Me? I’m Old School. As long as I have my ranfla, the Dodgers on radio, Oldies, and decent menudo now and then, I’m happier than any one of them.
 
Tío Juan’s iPhone let out a few notes of classical music by some guy wearing a wig wrote before anyone could stop him. Tío Juan made a face because he was being taken away from his book just when he was going to make a juicy mental note, it looked like. When he said “Hello,” a voice roared from the tiny box that told me it was my Tía Rosa who talked as if she was trying to summon her dead marido, the first one, del otro lado. The viejo jumped like some malvado lit a cuete under his silla. His book flew out of his wrinkled copper-colored manos like a spooked gallina. The libro, a thick one, landed at my feet making a loud noise.
 
“It’s your Tía Rosa,” he said all serious as he walked over to hand me his phone and retrieved his fat book.
 
“Hello Tía,” I said, sounding all happy. She promised to leave me her ‘39 Packard. She hadn’t driven it since her viejo Richard died, the Indio from Washington State with the genio of a wart hog. The carrucha had under 40,000 miles. No dents or scratches. The clock even worked.
 
“You sound triste,” she shot back and I moved my ear the standard six inches when talking to the Mejicana bullhorn.
 
I had to think since I wanted to make her feel happy so she would call me her favorite sobrino y gordito.
 
“No, no, I feel happy like it’s your birthday.”
 
“Gordo, I want you to do something for me.”
 
There was a pause. I thought she would then follow through like always with her rapid fire of words like so many balas.
 
“Well?” the tía vieja then said. I guess she wanted some kind of reaction from me.
 
“Uh, what is it?” As much as I wanted to be there for her and live up to her expectations, her idea of favors tested my ‘tude.
 
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic for someone in line to inherit my rancho in El Monte and my 1939 Packard.”
 
“I’m trying to hold my ganas so I can talk.”
 
“I’ll do the talking. My brother Fulgencio’s son Candelario from El Paso is crazy over some muchacha. He is lavishing her with money he doesn’t have, buying her this and that. He’s up to his usual tonterías.”
 
“I say leave well enough alone in El Paso. They take care of their gente, we take care of ours in East Los.”
 
“Listen fat head. That other fat head, the flaco, isn’t in El Paso.”
 
“That, too, is your brother’s problem. Did he run down to Mexico?”
 
“I should disown you and then put out a contract on you, that’s what I should do. No, if you would listen, maybe you too can put your life together. That other sobrino without any common sense is in L.A.”
 
“Why?” My stomach began to churn the enchiladas Tío Juan made for dinner. He is the best cook in our familia although not officially a member but an honorary hanger-on. Showed up one day looking for yard work and sort of grew on me like a grano. But that’s for another story.
 
“For love. Or what his distorted thinking calls love. He fell for some muchacha in El Paso and proposed to her.”
 
“Another one?”
 
“Yes, he collects these females like others collect botes.”
 
“It seems like he falls in love once a month. Like a novia-of-the-month club.”
 
“So now you can see why your Tío Fulgencio is concerned about his only hijo. Candy will spend all kinds of dough on her only to see it broken off by him and/or her.”
 
Candy was the family name for Candelario. I never thought it fit him since even as a chamaco, he had a sour look on his face like he was weaned on a pickle. I guess he eventually rearranged his face in order so he could hit on all these girls.
 
“Someone should remind him of all the other females he has gone through,” I said.
 
“His father did.”
 
“What did the loco say?”
 
“This is the one.”
 
“He said that with the first one, what’s her name?”
 
“Christina. She turned out to be married and went crying back to her husband from whom she was separated from for over two years.”
 
“Candy has that effect on women,” I said.
 
“So, I want you to track him down there in L.A. and pal around with him. Make him see he has no business chasing a woman in show biz.”
 
“Show biz?”
 
“Yes, she has aspirations of getting onto the stage or movies. I hear she is a looker.”
 
“I don’t see how I can help?”
 
“I do!” she said with a slam of the phone, a Chicana force unequaled by man or beast. I stood there, wondering what her next move would be.
 
“Did your Tía slam the phone on you again?” said Tío Juan from his silla.
 
“How can you tell?”
 
“The agitated look on your face, chubby cheeks and all. Did she say she was charging over like a mama bear after a biologist innocently swatting at butterfly specimens near her cub?”
 
“She didn’t get into that much detail. But that is usually her modus operandi. She’ll be rudely rushing into the house without a hello and a lot of do-this-and-do-that’s.”
 
“You better pull up the drawbridge because she can walk through walls by knocking them down if she is agüitada.”
 
“I can’t say no to her. I have too much invested in her being agreeable.”
 
“You can tell her that you have a bad muela that is dark, rotten and painful.”
 
“Even then, she will make my life very dark, very rotten and very painful.”
 
“What is she asking of you?”
 
“Part of my life.”
 
“She needs a transplant? One of your kidneys?”
 
“I’d take that over what she is demanding. She don’t ask. She wants me to babysit her nephew Candelario who, I hate to say, is also my primo.”
 
“Doesn’t he pass the time away in El Paso proposing to every other muchacha?”
 
“That was my reaction, a logical one. But you know Tía Rosa.”
 
“Like the bottom of my chanclas. How many names did she call you before she explained?”
 
“Just a few choice ones. She seemed in a hurry. Candelario is in L.A. chasing some loquita who thinks she is the next Eva Longoria. And, of course, he wants to marry her.”
 
“Why does your aunt care whom he marries. She don’t seem to care whom you marry, her favorite punching bag.”
 
“She says I got no worries. Women don’t like gordos who sit around listening to the radio, eating nonstop and letting out smelly pedos.”
 
“Your aunt is direct with you, isn’t she?”
 
“Yeah, but she wants me to be thin, happily casado.”
 
“Those are two demands for the ages.”
 
“Here’s the problem Tío Juan. I can’t stand being around the bato.”
 
“Why?”
 
“I knew you’d ask that.”
 
“For every action, there is a reason.”
 
“Yeah, you read all those books.”
 
“Actually, I got that from a fortune cookie at the Eternal Garden Chinese place on Soto near First. They went out of business soon after. No one cried. With good reason, like that cookie said. Their food was bound to kill their business if they didn’t kill a customer first.”
 
“I don’t like the way Candelario chews food, talks about himself and his love life nonstop, and sings those songs he claims he writes. Well, he can’t sing and he can’t write songs. And he always has something to say about the way I live, how much I eat and how much time I waste riding around and hopping my ranfla.”
 
“And he has the short list. Your Tía could give him the official list.”
 
“How come you’re always giving me patadas? You should be telling me stuff from all those books you always have your nose in. You know, how Aristotle, Casanova and them handled cosas.”
 
“I apply them and other minds I have absorbed in libraries and cantinas to your daily gripes. I guess you weren’t aware of that.”
 
“What do you say about the payaso Candelario?”
 
“An interesting case study.”
 
There was a pause. I was heaving as I inhaled and exhaled.
 
“Well, what should I do?” I said. “Should me and some homies jump him and FedEx him back to Tejas?”
 
“I take it you are trying hard at a chiste.”
 
“Not even.”
 
“Your Tía Rosa would disown you, not to mention your other tías. They work as a team during a crisis. Like a herd of elefantes protecting a valuable water hole during a draught in the Serengeti.”
 
“Then tell me the way.”
 
“That is for another counseling. I will make a suggestion regarding your current pickle after I have my Té de Canela.”
 
“Yeah, get that egghead of yours on the problem.”
 
I went outside to sit in my ranfla. I knew Tío Juan would think of something with that oblong head of his once he had his canela. He has saved me from all kinds of trouble, including girls, money, bills, stomach aches, headaches, plumbing, neighbors, and, of course, my tías who can be pushy.
 
I went back inside like I needed to get something important. I walked past him and he didn’t stop his musing, ignoring me like I was a passing mosca on a hustle.
 
I went back to my Impala to play some firme rollas, the background music to my vida. The first rolla that came on was “You’re No Good” by Betty Everett. I took it personally. Felt like she was singing to me and no one else. I could see her dedo touching my nose, making me cross-eyed right there in my driveway.
 
I was in that pickle Tío Juan talked about. I saw no way out. My Tía Rosa had heard my standard excuses, several times. I had used a dolor in every part of my body. And every part of my ranfla. I was lucky to be living with a man like Tío Juan who had the mind of a master criminal. He always found a way to cheat fate. I’d bet Candelario’s right leg he would find a way.
 
I fell asleep. Then I heard a knock on the window as “Workin’ On A Groovy Thing” by Patti Drew was playing. Tío Juan was signaling me with his arms flailing sideways. Someday I have to tell him the signal for lowering a car window is down.
 
I rolled down the window but then he again waved his hands in that sideway motion. I guess he now wanted me to lower the music. I also have to tell him that he has to point to the music with one hand and make a downward motion con la otra.
 
When I shut off the music, he cleared his garganta with a lot of noise I didn’t think could come out of the human cuerpo. He didn’t say anything so I gave him my So? mirada.
 
“I thought of something. Actually, it’s multiple choice with all the answers being right.”
 
Then came another pause. I gave him another So? mirada, this time punctuated with my hands raised to face level and to both sides of my head, palms up. He studied my gesture for a few moments, like he found the gesture amusing. I guess that’s what happens when your only entertainment is libros.
 
“Here’s the deal. Listen up.”
 
I waited this time, poker faced. He studied my face for a bit then spoke.
 
“You can introduce him to someone more feasible.”
 
“He would find any jaina feasible.”
 
“Not a problem. Your aunt is also his aunt and would probably find any girl too good for him.”
 
“You’re right. Tía Rosa is funny.”
 
“Hilarious. Okay, the second option is to introduce him to a decoy.”
 
“Like a pato?”
 
“No, too risky. He is not beyond proposing to a duck, wooden or otherwise. I mean, a real good looking female with even odds and ends of intelligence who he would propose to on first sight.”
 
“Heck with him. I’d keep her for myself.”
 
“That’s the problem I see here. You have as many character defects as Candelario and any other bato with hanging tongue in the 7.47 square miles that is East Los. And there are over 125,000 folks trotting around those square miles. A whole bunch of those guys like you and Candelario, guys getting wide-eyed and tongue dripping at the sight of any beauty who smiles momentarily at you, even by accident.”
 
I calculated that 125,000 was two fair-sized Dodger crowds. Tío Juan had slipped silently away and back into the house while I was calculating.
 
The following morning, Tía Rosa was at the foot of my bed as I opened my eyes. She was like a fantasma lleno do corajes. Before I could say, “What The Fudge!” she started to evaluate my life.
 
“You’re going to sleep right through your existence.”
 
I looked at the clock on the rickety nightstand near my pillow. It said quarter to six.
 
“Who let you in?” I said.
 
“That skinny viejo.”
 
Tío Juan rarely slept past 5 a.m. He had his morning tea and one scrambled egg burrito, chewing serenely at the kitchen table.
 
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
 
“I have a plan. Join me in the sala when you get dressed and brush your teeth. You know I don’t like bad breath.”
 
She left with a slam of my bedroom door. Where is the privacy in East L.A., I said to himself. I dressed quickly and brushed my teeth even quicker, knowing my Tía to have no patience when anyone made her wait. I guess she always had to feel like the most important person in a room.
 
I headed for the kitchen in search of coffee, but like a mama grizzly annoyed by a mocking visitor to Yellowstone, she growled then waved a paw toward a chair opposite where she was holding court. I responded submissively by sitting right away where she had pointed to.
 
She stared at me as if I was a chunk of questionable pancita de res she was going to toss into a pot of menudo.
 
“Candelario is a tonto. The only thing that keeps him fed is his good looks. His family doesn’t have the money to sponsor his viajes of tonterías. But they are proud and want us to lasso him and send him back to El Paso. When he first texted his family, they were happy. He said he finally met a girl they would love, too. He followed that with more texts. The last one said that she was going to be a movie star and was dancing to support herself. He knew that they would understand.
 
“Well, they didn’t. They called me and told me they were sure she was a stripper in some barrio who knows where. Do they have strippers around here, Gordo?”
 
“I heard they might,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t know.
 
She looked at me as if to say, Mentiroso.
 
“I’ll bet Tío Juan knows a few,” she said.
 
“Only if they have an exceptional reading room,” Tío Juan said as he had silently appeared, as usual, like a gato sneaking up on a ratón. He sat in a corner, stirring his tea, observing me since Tía Rosa had her back to him. She kept talking to me like he had been Hip-Hop coming from a passing car.
 
“From what the familia put together from his jumbled text, much like his mumbled speech, is that the girl’s name is Latina Destiny. At least her stage name. They’ve yet to hear her Tejas name. According to Candelario, she does something called a Banana Split on a pole. What that name means, I don’t want to know. He went on in his text to say that she had them all loco at Mr. Zapp’s. Who she or Señor Zapp is I never want to find out.”
 
For a person who knows everything, I found it hard to believe she didn’t want to know those things, too.
 
“It’s messed up, huh?” I said.
 
“More than that, payaso. He would be the shame of all the familia, both sides of the frontera.”
 
“Every family has one of those. We just have to take hold of our chones and still walk proud.”
 
“No seas ridículo, Arturo.”
 
“Tía, I remember hearing that Tío Fulgencio met his wife Claudia in Nogales, Mexico. He was stationed across the border at an Army base. She was a singer in a nightclub. So Candelario might have his father’s DNA and is attracted to women on stage. He can’t help it. His father grabbed his and took her home to El Paso. The familia worked on her and she became a domesticated Mejicana stirring frijoles on the stove. You could never tell she sang and moved her hips for a living. Mejicanas go with the flow since that one who whispered in Cortez’ ear and helped him jump our people.”
 
“What are you driveling about, Gordo?”
 
“Our history according to Tío Juan. He knows all that stuff about our gente going way back.”
 
“Well, right now we’re talking current affairs. And you are part of it. So, open up those oversized ears of yours. You will come to the aid of your primo.”
 
“It may be a family disorder or whatever it’s called. Maybe his chavalos in the future will be chasing and marrying ruckas like this Latina Destiny. We shouldn’t try to stop it.”
 
“The only disorder I see, Artie, is in your thinking. Wiggling around on stage while yodeling doesn’t make a good match for a man. Do I need to whack you on your chaveta to bring you back to the problem facing the family? This is a family crisis and you’re going to find Candelario and steer him to what is right.”
 
“Why me?”
 
“Why do you even ask? You are too difficult, Arturo. What about familia? Your sangre. You are too flojo to accomplish something meaningful en esta vida. You should jump for joy to help stop Candelario from bringing shame on the family for generations to come. You will find your primo. Besides, you used to be pals when growing up. You are the only one on both sides of the family who has nothing to do but ride around in that jalopy and hang around with cholos on Whittier Boulevard.”
 
“My car is not a jalopy. It’s a classic bomba. And my friends are not cholos. Not full time, anyway. And I listen to the Dodgers on the radio. Good, clean fun.”
 
“My point. You’re just sitting around that radio, getting fat eating and doing nothing else. Besides, I’m asking you to do this as a favor from a person that can determine your future way down the line.”
 
I know she was telling me that if I didn’t go along peacefully, she would show me what a malvada she could be by messing up my life forever. Her eyes focused on me like a spider she was about to swat with a wave of her chancla. She reminded me of La Llorona on a bad day.
 
“So you will jump on this right away, right, Artie?”
 
I thought quickly.
 
“Simón.”
 
Tía Rosa left like a drill sergeant, confident her orders would be followed. I almost saluted the rucka.
 
I looked over to Tío Juan who had his nose in a book like always.
 
“Tío Juan, we have to find Candelario and tell him what’s what.”
 
“Might have to slap him around some,” he said while slowly turning a page.
 
“I will text him and tell him to meet me on the corner of Sunset and Vine, like in the movies.”
 
L.A. can be confusing and if some bato gives you an address, even with GPS, it ain’t easy. And I didn’t have GPS.
 
I did receive his address in a text on Tío Juan’s phone from Tía Rosa. It was a bungalow on a residential street on the edge of Hollywood. I rang the doorbell, knocked on the door and pleaded with Candelario to open the door because I wanted to save his life. He didn’t come to the door and it sounded like no one ever would.
 
It was a letdown. I was in a strange part of L.A. and Candelario was nowhere to nail. Walking around, away from my ranfla, I couldn’t think smoothly. My Impala and me are a team, like a charro and his horse. I didn’t know where to go. I started to walk around and something told me to go to the front bungalow. There a sign said Manager, Knock First and I guess the same thing in a list of words below that in four other languages. I rang the doorbell not once but four times. Out of habit, I thought I’d see a Chicano brown face and had to step back when the pinkest dude I had ever seen opened the door. He was also one of the skinniest dudes I’d ever seen. He was tall and looked down on me as if I was an abandoned perro.
 
He grunted something. I said, “Huh?” He cleared his throat and said, “What you need?” in some accent from somewhere. I told him and he brought me up to date regarding my person of interest, Candelario.
 
He laid out Candelario’s schedule as if he had planned it himself. He said Candelario was like a trained something—I couldn’t make out the word—and did everything at the same time every day. It was a long schedule the bony bato had memorized. I remembered that he got home at six, stayed for an hour then went out. After that, he said he got back to his bungalow at all hours, sometimes after midnight.
 
The streets around here were full of fast cars and people walking like they were going to meet someone with lots of money. The buses were packed with Raza going to work in Westside restaurants and homes, working from morning till night.
 
I felt a strange new respect for My Gente as they travelled from East Los, Maywood, Downey, and other lugares miles away to provide for their familias. I couldn’t wait to get back to Tío Juan to see what his take was on all this. He always has something to say about everything I see and do.
 
Then something hit me like an electrical shock I once got when I plugged in a lámpara while I was desnudo and wet. I felt like Dios himself was smiling down on me and everything around me. Why? Because I was safely miles away from Tía Rosa, the big mandona.
 
Back to Candelario. Reminds me like when you’re looking for something and you start getting mad at everything and everybody but yourself. It’s like Tío Juan looking for his iPhone, he doesn’t find it until someone calls him. Could be days. I was hoping for something quicker in my search. Seeing the fine jainas walking and driving around, I didn’t care if I ever found Candelario, but then I saw the bato walking in front of me at a red light.
 
I honked but he kept walking and bouncing as if he heard music no one else did. And he did. He had ear buds on. I pulled over in a red zone, the only spot nearby that was open and saw him bouncing down the boulevard like he was rengo since, like I said, he couldn’t dance. I then saw him go into an office. It took me about ten minutes to find parking a block away. I half walked and half ran toward that office.
 
I tried the door but it was locked. I called out his name. The name on the door said Alphonso Bolinso, Agent For New Talent. From the other side of the puerta, I heard all kinds of voices, some in Spanish, some in English and one in some language that I never heard in the barrio.
 
I pounded on the door. Appearing in a small window was a face I didn’t like but had to look at. It was Candelario. My suerte was kicking in, the good kind for a change.
 
He unlocked the door after several turns, the last one sounding like an industrial strength bolt lock. “Artie, what do you want? How’d you get here? Did you make a wrong turn and finally make it out of East L.A.?”
 
“I went to where you lived and the manager and all those other things gave me your schedule. I didn’t remember most of it and I didn’t expect to see you hustling across a street.”
 
“I gave him that schedule but I really don’t have one.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Well, people around here are all nosey and want to know what you’re up to. Like they’re ready to call the cops. You feel like you’re being watched all the time from behind windows and from rooftops. And I have more reasons, ese. I might tell you later. No, I’ll tell you now, Artie. I fell for a girl. It was like Canelo hit me with his left hook. She is the finest jaina in any barrio you can name.”
 
The loquito looked at me like a bato who has just lost his mind, a hideous smile on his face, waiting for me to give him un abrazo. I had to tell him all he was telling me was already family chisme flying around Texas, and that I was sent by our Tía Rosa to slap him back to his senses.
 
So, I didn’t hug him or anything, but just gave him the standard Órale.
 
“Thanks, you’re true Raza from way back,” he said. “I may be jumping the gun, pero I think it will turn out right. Come in. I’ll give you all the happy details.”
 
“What are you doing here? It looks like a dump.”
 
“It’s part of the deal. Let me tell you how it is.”
 
He opened the door and I followed. There were people packed into the room like when you go to a firme party in the Hood. But these people didn’t look like they knew how to have any fun. They talked all serious. They were talking and talking, not even paying attention that I was watching them, like they were all high on a new droga going around.
 
Candelario saw my face, probably looking all confused so he gave me some details.
 
“Performers of all kinds,” he said, “waiting to see Alphonso Bolinso. It’s summer so clubs need people with even a little talent to sell drinks and demand a big cover charge. Summer is Christmas to club entertainers. All over this city, as June sets in, standups stand up, blood gushes in the veins of dancers, and hypnotists make their eyes big to make people believe they are dogs barking in a junkyard. It’s time to book your act and people are paying tribute to the legendary Bolinso.”
 
“What’s all this have to do with you, a flojo from El Paso?”
 
“Plenty. If you see a skinny bato who looks homeless come from that office, jump him because that will be Alphonso. The more money he makes, the more he dresses like he don’t have any. Years ago, they said he was mugged because of his flashy dress. If you do corner Alphonso, he might not remember me.”
 
“You said you’d tell me about some deal that brought you here.”
 
“Okay, man, I got into—”
 
Suddenly, Candelario’s eyes opened as if he just saw a twenty waving at him. He jumped and sprang at this frumpy-looking dude with hair shooting here and there. Candelario got to him before the others even turned their heads. The singers, dancers, standup comics, piano players and comedy teams had the look of defeat as they saw Candelario get into the face of Alphonso Bolinso as if he wanted to kiss him. Alphonso turned and Candelario followed closely as they walked by me.
 
Mr. Bolinso lit a cigar, sat then looked at us like he wanted to throw us back into the streets. “Let me tell you something Candel” he said. “And listen.” Candelario sat, then put a fist under his chin as if to signal he was hanging on every syllable. Mr. Bolinso studied Candelario for a few seconds then shot an imaginary basketball at an imaginary hoop.
 
“Let me tell you,” he then spoke again. “I saw you do your act as I promised La Destiny. You got a hint of talent here and there. You got a long way to go but you are on the road. I can get you into a club if you accept seventy-five per cent. I don’t have to offer you even that but the young lady kept texting me. It’s yours for the taking. Do I hear a ‘sure I’ll take it’?”
 
“You sure do, I accept,” he said in the deepest voice I ever hear come out of the bato.
 
Outside on the sidewalk, Candelario laughed all crazy and waved a hand for a high-five. I waved a hand sin ganas.
 
“Oh, yeah. I was saying when Alphonso came out that L.D.’s mother used to be in entertainment. She was from back in the old days but I think I heard of her somewhere from somebody. She sang but also danced. Muy sexy. I met her and I could see she must have been fine when she was young. But she says I don’t sing and then added that it doesn’t look like I do anything. She told Destiny that I didn’t look like I could support her for a week. Said no to our joining hands like she meant business.
 
“You remember how great I sing and write songs, so Destiny got hold of the sloppy viejo Bolinso and got him to say he would spare me a few of his precious moments and put me somewhere if I showed him. She can make him listen. He then said he would get back to me. Well, today, I made him get back to me. You heard him. I get to keep seventy-five per cent of what I make and he will find a place for me to sing.”
 
“He’s taking a lot,” I said, “but that’s better than the IRS if you win the Lotto.”
 
I felt weak at the knees. I could see Tía Rosa’s cara when she heard Fulgencio’s hijo was not only still chasing the loose woman but also was going to get on stage, too. Tía Rosa felt nothing came before familia, not even someone’s happiness, including mine. She’s always telling me that our family tree goes way back on both sides of the border and that we had all kinds of history that had important people doing all kinds of things everywhere. She tells me in detail but she talks so fast that I can’t remember everything. She tells me when I do something to make her agüitada so that’s why she says the family stuff so fast. What she would say when she heard this breaking news, I don’t even want to think about.
 
“Let’s go back to East Los, Candelario,” I said. “Tío Juan can fix us some comida to make you think right. I could eat a dozen of his tacos right now. And hold on while I call somebody.” I walked a few feet away.
 
I knew at the start that Tía Rosa shouldn’t have picked me to get this tonto away from someone he wanted to marry. I needed backup. I thought of Tía Rosa herself but that was like asking for problemas on top of all the current ones. I thought things out and thought I would text Candelario’s father and tell him he needed to show up as fast as he could.
 
“Who were you texting?” asked Candelario when we got to my car.
 
“Just Tío Juan to find out what he was preparing for cena,” I said.
                                                                        ֍
On the following Tuesday, Candelario appeared at a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena that had singing on a stage right next to where people ate, which was risky for the restaurant. He had practiced in his bathroom with a neighbor banging the wall after two hours. I drove around with the ventanas all the way up so he could let out his lungs. I was encouraging him, which encouraged me since he sounded worse with every mile. I wanted his first gig to be such a relaje that he would never again try to inflict his singing on anyone; and that would end his chances of being Latina Destiny’s marido. So, I stepped to one side.
 
But the bato was determined. On Saturday and Sunday, we almost lived in my Impala as I drove around while he sang all kinds of songs, all out of tune. He had a special CD with just the background music of songs I never heard of. The bato never got tired. It was like he would die if he stopped singing.
 
Candelario makes a strange noise with his tongue, then a stranger noise with his garganta and starts:
 
“There’s a streetcar at the corner.”
CANDELARIO with a deep voice: “Why?”
CANDELARIO in a high voice: “To take me to my destiny.”
CANDELARIO with the deep voice: “To your destiny?"
CANDELARIO with the high voice (staying with his goal): “To take me to my destiny.”
CANDELARIO with the deep voice (not believing him): “No kidding?”
CANDELARIO with the high voice: “I’m from the stars.”
CANDELARIO with the deep voice: “I’m from Eagle Pass.”
 
He repeated those words over and over. I told him ya trucha, I’m going to drop you off on the corner. But the bato said this is what performers do, even in opera. This would get him Destiny. I said he needed all the getting he could get. And then the bato said to me, “So you have my back, ese!” And he sang on.
 
He then switched to some song about lovebirds. He told me that that was a song Destiny sang at a Hollywood club. It was like he was telling me a miracle performed by a saint.
 
No lie, but the restaurant expected Candelario to be there in time to start crooning at 12 noon for the lunch crowd. I said they had to be delusional since he was still snoring at that hour, but Candelario said if he was to eat while in L.A. he had to be there. I was nodding like what he said really made sense, until he made it plain that I was supposed to be there with him. I had expected just to go to his bungalow at night to see him all sad because he had bombed. But I never let a homie down. So, I had to drop plans to go to a Mexican restaurant I found on Cesar Chavez Avenue that has better corn tortillas than even Tío Juan’s. I followed Candelario, instead. They were playing soft instrumental Rancheras over an intercom for atmosphere, I guess. I sat down. It wasn’t much of a lunch crowd that ate in the atmosphere, which seemed to trigger yawns from one table to the next. I didn’t know if it was the bland décor, the food or the music. I was just going to order a taco till Candelario came on. I joined the yawns of some guy who looked like he’d rather be eating a hot dog with plenty of mustard as he forced an enchilada into his boca and down his throat. It was then that I noticed an hermosa for the ages sitting at the next table.
 
Órale. I don’t like lying. When I came in, I saw an hermosa sitting at a table, so I went a de volada to the one next to it. I began to check her out like I was shopping for hydros to put in my Impala. I wanted the lugar to have better lights so I could appreciate her curves and finish. She was small, with big Chicana eyes and the reddest lips I have ever seen. It was a wasted work of art that was sitting in the dark.
 
Then the lighting got better, and the speaker system began to blast a tune which sounded like I’d heard many times before, which I had. Then Candelario came out in a maroon coat down to his knees, pegged black pantalones tucked into high-top calcos, his chaveta topped by a burgundy Fedora hat with a white feather that nearly reached the ceiling or so it seemed to me. He bumped into a chair on stage, turned maroon himself and began to sing that destiny song.
 
It was messed up. The pobre loquito got scared that his voice came and went. Mostly went. He sounded like a bad cell phone connection going in and out.
 
I got relaxed. I saw that he was not going to be around that Destiny girl after today. I felt bad for the pobre, but it now looked like things were looking up. Nobody’s gonna pay good money or any money to see Candelario drive customers into the streets. This would be “one night only” appearance. He would have to sell chicle in the street. The vieja would say, “Lárgate and don’t think about my hija ever again.” And if things go like they’re supposed to, I could see me pushing Candelario into a Greyhound bus with the destination “El Paso Express” then getting an abrazo from Tía Rosa and then the keys to her ’39 Packard. Then I saw myself cruisin’ down Whittier Boulevard with all eyes wide, and fine jainas wanting a ride.
 
He finished his song sin ganas and dragged himself away with deafening silence, como dicen. I was hoping to see him sneak over to me, but he stepped onto the stage again.
 
I think I heard a gasp from a few people eating and that was with comida in their bocas. He started singing. I expected beer bottles and salsa to start flying. It was a normal song about walking under stars with a rucka by some river with a name that wasn’t the L.A. River, with some other words, pero Candelario sang it like it was about somebody dying and soon, leaving an esposa and all kinds of chavalos. Halfway through the song, I wanted to jump on the stage and hug the skinny tonto. It was like everything was messed up and nobody could do anything about it.
 
He got to a romantic part, then it got weird. The girl at the next table got up from her chair, stepped back, spreading her arms and began to join him. I say, “joined him,” but it really didn’t go down like that because as soon as she started Candelario stopped as if he was clotheslined.
 
I never felt so let down since I was born. I wanted to raise the collar of my Pendleton and lowride on my silla. It felt like everyone was checking me out.
 
All embarrassed and hunched in my chair, I saw Candelario. He looked different. He was standing there with an attitude. The chavala was singing pretty good, and it seemed to make Candelario stand straighter with a serious look. When she got to some words, he jumped in, and they sang the song like Johnnie and Joe. He left the stage like he was popular. The few people around told him to come back, and only quit when they piped in some girl singer like Arianna Grande or Lady Gaga.
 
I looked over to the girl but she had disappeared from my life like other girls. I sat up and made the walk toward Candelario behind a curtain. He was sitting on crate full of beer, looking like he just saw the Virgen.
 
“Isn’t she special, Artie,” he said like he was talking about the Virgen. “I didn’t think she’d be around. She has to dance this week somewhere in Montebello, so I think she will get there barely in time for her afternoon performance. She risked it all just to come and see me. She’s my special angel, Artie. My savior. If she wasn’t here, it would have been a disaster. I got rattled, I couldn’t think. I will make it through the next show easy.”
 
I was happy I had texted his father. He would come in handy. I was losing my grip on things.
                                                                        ֍
The following semana, I saw Candelario and got to meet the chavala. I also shook hands with her mother, a mean looking Mejicana of the old school. She had a real chingona look. She made sure I knew her name was “Mrs. Sanlego.” Then Candelario’s father rode into town. My Tío Fulgencio is the classiest old bato in the familia. He doesn’t have Tía Rosa’s tongue but neither does anyone else. Still, since I was a chamaco, Tío Fulgencio made me feel I was taking in too much oxygen that could better be used by moscas. He doesn’t mess with me like Tía Rosa, especially since he lives in Tejas and has his hands full with Candelario. The way they bother me is different. Tía Rosa blames all problems in the barrio and surrounding calles on me, while Tío Fulgencio just likes to blame me for being me.
 
I know for sure Tío Fulgencio sang Rancheras here and there years ago. He likes the stage himself. He couldn’t sing. So, it’s in Candelario’s blood to be on stage without a reason.
 
Tío Fulgencio is one bossy dude, always telling people to go here, do that and don’t do that. Even other people’s kids, which causes him problems in public. But he looks like a boss of something, no matter where he goes. At Walmart, they always mistake him for the manager even when he’s loading cerveza onto his cart. Still, like I said, I heard he was singing Rancheras and Norteño/Conjunto years ago in bars. They say he played the accordion sometimes but not good.
 
I can imagine a lot of things but I can’t see Tío Fulgencio singing anything in any bar.
 
I prepped for a long abrazo but he backed off as if I was the Diablo wanting his soul.
 
“What are you up to, Arturo? Why did you text me like someone was dying?”
 
“It’s complicated,” I said, “and goes on and on. Con permiso, I’ll tell you in slow, easy parts like a telenovela. Let me take you on a quick trip to a club in Montebello.”
 
The muchacha Latina Destiny was going on her second week at The Flyers club in Montebello. She was that good. And she just sang three songs while she danced around. And by dance, I mean she got a big workout matched by the men’s eyes and lungs. Her outfits and music selection were both thin. Tío Fulgencio just stared like he was watching a magic show up to the moment she dashed off the stage to whistles and howls.
 
“Han pasado muchos años desde que canté con mi grupo.”
 
That’s all he said even though he continued to stare at the stage as if he were watching himself in some kind of spooky flashback. The pariente was making me nervous.
 
Some dude then came out and asked everyone to give Latina Destiny a big applause, which they did along with the whistles and howls.
 
“What do you think, Tío?” I said.
 
He just went on staring.
 
“Muchos años. Did you say something, Arturo?”
 
“You saw her. Tell me what you think of her.”
 
“Who? Oh, the Destiny girl.”
 
“Yes. The muchacha your muchacho is engaged to marry.”
 
He looked away like he had to take in the news slowly, wearing a serious face. Like always.
 
The muchacha came out for more whistles and howls and she heard them with a big smile. The men wanted her to shake some more. Finally, she wiggled off stage and I looked at Tío Fulgencio again.
 
“What do you think?” I said.
 
“She can sing. And dance, although I don’t like the way she dances but she has the moves.”
 
“Okay, Tío, let me take you a few miles from here on the other side of East Los.”
 
I drove him in my ranfla to the restaurant where Candelario was going to get me in good with Tía Rosa after I got him back to El Paso. I could already see the `39 Convertible Coup Packard in my driveway. As soon as we sat down at a table, the bato came out.
 
“Next to solve your problem,” I said, “Candelario.”
 
I didn’t know what the uncle from El Paso was going to do, but what he did confused me—he just sat there, not saying anything. He sat there like a stuffed tío staring at Candelario as he went on about love and all its confusion. I was feeling for the old bato because it had to be a jolt shot through his cuerpo to see his only hijo in a red shirt and purple pants, but it was best he got the details of the problem with his own eyes. I didn’t want to explain to him what was happening to his son’s life and with just words and without living proof. With just words, he would just think that Candelario was marrying someone somewhere for whatever reason.
 
When Candelario shuffled out I couldn’t believe my ears. Candelario was sounding better. He found a singing voice from somewhere and was showing it off like a fine woman. It was like when he went to Garfield High and was wailing, “Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard” over and over on top of the Garfield High School sign. How he got up there and back down is an East Los mystery to this día. He was using the same fuerza now.
 
After Candelario left the stage, my Tío sat squeezed into his seat like he was sitting between two fat borrachos. He then looked at me with narrow eyes like I was trying to trick him.
 
“¿Qué está pasando, Arturo?”
 
He said it in a low voice like juicy chisme, but it sounded like a threat of cachetadas if I didn’t give him the right answer.
 
“He got into show biz,” I said in a low voice, “porque, he wants to do what her mother wants him to do. He can’t marry her unless he does something on stage. Maybe you could talk to the woman. She’s old school with an attitude to match. She is more reason why you should crash this whole party. After you talk to him, I can lowride back to the Hood and let you take further action.
 
The Mother and daughter were living in a part of West L.A. in an apartment building that looked expensive but once you get to their little space in that building, you see it would be just survival space in East L.A. and with minimal rent. Here, they were paying way more than minimal anything. The madre answered the door and seeing me, she let us in, my Tío hidden behind my wide body. We only saw her back as she pointed to two wooden chairs in the middle of the room.
 
“Nice to meet up with you again, Mrs. Sanlego,” I said all convinced I was nearing the end of my journey. She turned at last and I heard a choking racket from behind me, like my Tío had a chicken bone atorado in his throat.
 
“¡Carmelita!” Tío Fulgencio said, then making a sound like air being let out of a llanta. He leaned on me like he was drowning.
 
The Sanlego woman stared at him, then she squealed and her arms went up like Fourth of July Fireworks.
 
“¡Fulgencio! You are Fulgencio, aren’t you?” she said as if she might be wrong.
 
But Tío Fulgencio himself looked like he was almost ready to cry. They hugged like they were never going to part again.
 
I need some kind of legal notice to deal with stuff like this. The look on Tío’s face made me feel like I was seeing him in some kind of altered state like you see in movies. The horror kind. He didn’t look like the all-knowing Tío Fulgencio who never said anything funny, never laughed. He was smiling and acting like a bato on a first date. I don’t mean no disrespect, but the old bato was riendo, like, for no reason. The Señora Sanlego, who always looked like she was ready to pull greñas, was now acting like a chavalita on Christmas morning.
 
“¡Fulgencio!”
 
“¡Carmelita!”
 
“¡Querido Fulgencio! I never thought I would see you again!”
 
“I thought you never left El Paso for anything.”
 
I didn’t know what was going on, but I felt left out of something.
 
“My Tío wants to tell you something, Señora Sanlego.”
 
“I knew it was you right away, Carmelita!”
 
“Ya hace muchos años since I was around you, hombre, and you look the same.”
 
“¡Hay, Carmelita! ¡Soy un viejo!”
 
“¿Why are you way over here? I guess”—Señora Sanlego’s smile disappeared—“¿tu esposa está contigo?”
 
“She died years ago, Carmelita.”
 
Señora Sanlego looked at the suelo. “You should have stuck to your own kind, Fulgencio. I don’t want to talk about the pobre who is dead, you know her name, I forget it, pero it would have been better if you had gone after a singer. I still remember you made muchachas cry when you let out a grito then sang, ‘Me cansé de rogarle, que yo sin ella de pena muero...’”
 
“Qué guapa te veías Carmelita vestida, como una charra,” Tío said like he was choking again. “Do you remember the zapateados you did on the stage? I used to say that you did the sexiest zapateados in all of Tejas.”
 
“I wouldn’t even try now. Dios mío, Fulgencio, you knocked them out when you were on stage, even the bien borrachos,” said Señora Sanlego in the saddest voice I ever heard in a Mejicana, since my abuelita’s on Arizona Avenue who was always saying that the world was pitiful and was ending, which she repeated daily.
 
“Te acuerdas Carmelita how we let them have it at the feria in Luling? The Watermelon Thump Festival? I had to sing most of the songs in English, making up lyrics to keep people’s attention. I think even Mejicanos there didn’t speak Spanish too good.”
 
“We were happy.”
 
“Tell me Carmelita, how come you left Tejas?”
 
“I wanted to watch over my mija Dolores, make sure she is safe. But I shouldn’t worry. She is a strong girl. I heard through the chisme network that your son ran off chasing a girl. Then I heard through more chisme that my girl Dolores ran off to L.A. to act. Then I heard through even more chisme that you followed your son here because he was in L.A. I lied when I asked about your wife. I knew you were single. I had hoped you would look me up but when that never happened, I saw my chance to run into you here.”
 
Tío Fulgencio was looking at her as if he was looking at someone he had never seen before. The viejo still looks pretty good. I could see the dude when he was younger would have made jainas of his time lick their chops, grab their chones and check their hair. I saw uglier batos with good looking chavalas. I figured they had the feria to do that. Tío has that wavy gray hair, trimmed mustache, just as gray, and the right wrinkles to make him look distinguished, like women say they like. And maybe with a few bucks in his pockets they can feel for.
 
“You mean you had the hots for me, like I did for you?” he said.
 
“Por supuesto. Why do you think I let you sing most of the Ranchera and Norteño tunes? I was always around the stage even when I wasn’t doing any dancing or singing just to be near you. ¿Recuerdas how I often had a bag of pan dulce for you after a show? And I always bought extra puerquitos because I found out they were your favoritos.”
 
“Pero—”
 
“And remember when I gave you my half of a burrito at the San Antonio Fair when we only had enough money for one. We performed there but they didn’t pay us right away.”
 
“¡Carmelita!”
 
“And don’t forget the Tlayudas I made you from my family recipe from Oaxaca. Do you think I just did that because you looked hungry? I was working on your estómago until that hip-shaking chavala took you from right under my clay comal. That’s why I wouldn’t let Dolores marry a joven called Candelario, till he went on stage somewhere, anywhere. She’s a rising star—”
 
“Estoy en acuerdo, Carmelita. She has what it takes.”
 
“You mean, you saw her somewhere?”
 
“At the place in Montebello. Gordo there (pointing to me like a witness identifying the alleged criminal), I mean Arturo, drove me there. But if he loves her, Carmelita, you should let him love her. He is singing now just for her.”
 
“Mija tells me he sings at a restaurant that’s not very good with just a few people clapping for him.”
 
“We went through that, Carmelita, remember? We sang at a bar with only two pool players who never looked up from their game then there was pedo between them and they both got tossed. After that, we had no audience. So, don’t make Candelario feel like a pestoso. I can understand you feeling like your mija is going to marry an obstacle—”
 
“How come you want this Candelario sinvergüenza, to go after Dolores?”
 
“He’s my hijo.”
 
“¿No?” she said, sounding like a gato someone was choking.
 
“Así es, Carmelita. I just heard him sing. ¡Carmelita, me dio mucho gusto! He has what it takes. It was meant to be. He’s my son and could one day be singing the old Rancheras. He’s been a cabrón up to now. I really worked hard, almost breaking my back on some jobs. I did it so I had money to invest in him, so he could become something. I wanted to be an example to him. The hours were long and the sudor was constant. I had to eat right, cut out the cerveza, or at least drink less of it, and I was afraid to lose it on a job and be laid up for good. I did it for him so he would work hard, seeing how good we lived, but I, myself, really wanted to be singing on stages everywhere. That’s where I belonged.”
 
Señora Carmelita, not a spring chicken, leaped at him and fell into his arms like he had just won the lotería.
 
“Let’s get back together, like it’s supposed to be!” she whimpered. “Your esposa is buried and gone, your hijo might have some talent. Dolores’s father left one day and never came back. Return to me! Too many years have been wasted, so I am ready to jump back on stages donde sea. I still want to be with you like before as if no time has gone by. Like we’re still young and reckless. We belong singing and bailando together till we reach our sunsets.”
 
Tío Fulgencio made a weird noise with his throat or nose, I couldn’t tell which one, then stared at her.
 
He whispered something that wasn’t her name but something in Spanish that sounded like a pet name.
 
“Estás aquí, muchacho,” said the rucka like a girl. “You returned to me after all these years!...You are here. I’m not going to let you wander off this time!”
 
He fell forward and they fell into another major abrazo. I’m not sure if he was ready to faint or he just lunged at her because he got all worked up. “Ay, Carmelita, mi Carmelita, sweet Carmelita! Squeeze me tight. Tighter. Let me watch over you from now on.”
 
I moved slowly toward the door and snuck out. I felt funny. I can deal with a lot of things, but this was different. It was at another level. I walked like a buzzed bato to my ranfla.
 
Candelario called me at home while I was eating Tío Juan’s specialty, Pozole de Guajolote. Candelario sounded like he was now Number One on the Billboard’s Hot 10.
 
“Artie,” he said, “I’m going to be a big star.”
 
“We all feel that way, sometimes,” I said, and looked at a text message that had arrived ten minutes before from Tía Rosa. I had been reading it then re-reading it since it arrived.
 
“Destiny and me got to her apartment tonight. Guess who we found there? Apá! He was holding hands with Señora Sanlego.”
 
“¿De veras?”
 
“Simón. They were sitting close.”
 
“No lie?”
 
“He is going to marry her.”
 
“Not surprised.”
 
“I’m going to marry Destiny.”
 
“No surprise there either.”
 
“Artie, foo, I feel like un hombre reborn. The fates are working overtime. Apá is twenty years older than her. He and Señora Sanlego want to get back together to sing and dance like they used to, even going all over Texas again with their act.”
 
I stopped chewing.
 
“Candy, ese,” I swallowed then said, “lemme think. I need my space. I think my brain is shorting.”
 
“Sorry, man. So, you are now going to lowride into the sunset?”
 
I looked down at Tía Rosa’s text.
 
“Not even.”
 
He hung up and I read the text again.
 
“What have you done? I should go see you.” And she added a skull emoji that made me sit up, all three-hundred pounds of me.
 
I grabbed a Squeeze Ball in the shape of an aguacate Tío Juan bought me on his last trip to Tijuana, knowing I hate aguacates because I can’t eat them. They give me chorro. I then texted back. I didn’t know what I was going to say but the words came. Maybe that has happened to you, I don’t know. “No,” I texted, “don’t move. Everyone here is singing their cabezas off.” 

hTommy Villalobos  was born in East L.A. and also raised there. He thinks of the lugar daily and love the memories while remembering the tragedies of his neighbors and of his madre. Tommy’s mother had a great sense of humor and he inherited about ten per cent of it. She had a quick wit and response to all verbal attacks, whether to herself personally or to her Catholic religion that she loved. Tommy dedicates all his works to her, knowing she had him when she had no idea how she was going to feed him and his four siblings. She was a single mom until the day she died. He lives in a boring suburb now, outside of Sacramento, but his heart and soul will always be in East Los Angeles where his mother was always by his side to protect him. 

Mamá is ripping weeds from vegetable beds, her focus deep between the stalks of the tomato plants—her trance, as Pablo calls it. I monitor her from the side of my vision, knowing better than to look at her directly, but she knows I am watching, perhaps because my hands do not move as quickly as hers do, not as deftly. I work faster to compensate, and not just because her brown eyes flash for a moment over mine in silent command; it is summer and every hour the jungle encroaches on our clearing, sending its tendrils into the garden, the wood pile, between the very boards of the house if it could. Mamá has completed her side of the patch and turns her attention to the soil in front of her while she waits for me to finish.
 
The dirt rises in mounds between her palms, and I don’t need to watch to know what she is making. She continues as I yank at weeds, the small stingers of the melon vines sinking into my fingers as they accidentally collide with one another in my haste. Mamá pinches the soil between her fingers, attaching a smaller mound and four appendages to each of the twin mounds. She pats their surfaces, smooths them.
 
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” she begins, and my mouth forms around the next verses while I work. We recite it together, our voices barely above a hush.
 
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them,” she says, then rests her knees in the dirt. She doesn’t need to finish the story; we both know how it finishes. And we both know how she will finish it.
 
“God gave us a second chance,” she concludes, looking down at her creations. “He gave us a second chance.”
 
She smiles out at the line where the bare dirt succumbs to a wall of green, of fronds and vines and leaves alive with the hum of insects, of birds calling to one another through the gloom.
 
“And why you and Papá called me Edén,” I add for her.
 
“That’s right,” she chuckles, nodding. “That’s right.”
 
I have been expecting this ritual since just before dawn, when Mamá’s groans woke Pablo and me and stirred the younger children, and Papá had to shake her awake, rocking her in his arms.
 
“You’re safe, woman, you’re safe,” he whispers, and I can hear her sharp breaths ease into sobs. “We made it.”
 
“We made it,” she repeats.
 
“We crossed the wilderness,” he says.
 
“We crossed the wilderness,” she says.
 
“We crossed the sea,” he says.
 
“We crossed the sea,” she says.
 
“And we arrived in the promised land. We are in the promised land.”
 
Her voice is calm again. “We are in the promised land.”
 
Pablo and I see the whites of Papá’s eyes through the twilight as he returns our stares, and without a word we push the blankets off us, dress ourselves, and go outside to ready the firepit. He lights the lamps and the fire, and I fumble in the darkness to hang the pot over the burgeoning flames. Pablo’s eyes roll toward mine, and mine to his. And I think of Mamá’s cracked hands and dirtied nails, fashioning the soil after her own image.
 
These fits come like freak storms, but I learned early that they almost always come when I ask questions, when I invite the past to come creeping in from its hiding place just beyond the tree line. Suddenly, my vision fills with white light and I am small again, not much older than the twins, the top of my head just barely reaching Mamá’s hip. She has given up on coaxing me to help her shell the peas and instead smiles, allowing me to embrace and kiss her swollen womb. Juana. Pablo plays with something on the floor, barely able to walk.
 
“Mamá, do you got a mamá?”
 
“I told you: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…”
 
“But that was Adán and Eva. And they had to leave the Garden. And they had Caín and Abel, but Caín killed Abel, and then he and his family wandered the earth.”
 
She says nothing, her smile unwinding at the edges.
 
“How’d we get back?”
 
“Why you ask so many questions?” She’s trying to be playful, but there is a command behind her question.
 
“Are we the only ones here?”
 
“Go play with the doll Papá made for you,” she says as she gestures to the wooden doll on the floor with her knife.
 
That was the first time I remember her screaming in the night, Papá cradling her, chin atop her head.
 
The next morning, Mamá perches me in a chair beside her at the table and makes me watch while she makes bread with the flour she bought from the trader. She pulls at the dough, rolls and unrolls and rolls it again into a perfect orb. Finally, tearing off a handful, and then another, she makes two human forms on the table in front of us.
 
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” she begins.
 
I don’t understand, and wait for her to continue.
 
“Say it with me. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…’”
 
“‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…’”
 
We recite it all the way to when God sent Adán and Eva from the Garden, and cursed Eva with the pains of childbirth, my eyes roving over Mamá’s distended belly.
 
“We got back. And that’s all that matters. You understand?”
 
“Yes, Mamá.”
 
“Everything that happened before—it doesn’t matter.”
 
“Yes, Mamá.”
 
But still I find ways to ask my questions in the years that follow, sprinkle them in among the scratch while I help her feed the chickens, drop them into the holes she makes in the soil with her fingers when we plant for the new season.
 
“Mamá, why you and Papá got brown eyes, but I got green ones?”
 
“Mamá, why is Papá’s skin darker than ours?”
 
“Mamá, where does the trader get all our flour and seeds and…”
 
Mamá grunts and holds her back. She leans back onto her haunches. At this point Juana is about five, and her successor, Diego, four, and Mamá has begun to show again, her belly like a squash growing on the vine. I count out on my fingers like Mamá taught me: There are one-two-three-four of us, and this one will make five. Mamá blows air through her lips, but then leans forward again and returns to gardening.
 
“Is the baby coming?”
 
“No, it’s too soon. My back must just be cramping.”
 
But she wakes early in the night, in the grips of one of her bad dreams, and Papá carries out their ritual. But this time, it is not enough; her breaths continue fast and sharp in the back of her throat. Papá rises and dresses, then plops me into the bed next to her.
 
“I gotta go get help for your mother,” he informs me, “take care of her while I’m gone.”
 
Mamá pulls me into her, takes my hand into hers, but it is hot, sweaty. Pablo watches from our bed, his eyes shiny in the candlelight, and she opens her other arm in invitation to him too. We sit on either side of her, but soon she breaks free from us, screaming. Papá returns with the woman who delivered us. She strokes my cheek in recognition before handing me to my father, who returns Pablo and me to our own bed. But we do not sleep, cannot sleep over Mamá’s agony. By sunup, Papá orders us to feed the animals, and we do it in a rush so that we can return to our vigil. But he tells us to stay outside, shuffles Juana and Diego out with us. We sit on a cluster of stumps not far away, swinging and hitting their bark with our heels, stomachs empty and livid. Finally, the commotion in the shack subsides, and the silence is filled with the sound of insects. No one opens the door for a long time.
 
When Papá lets us back in, Mamá is sleeping while the woman still tends to her. Papá summons us around the table. A wadded rag is the only thing on top of it, wetted with what looks like dried water and blood. He removes a corner so that we can see the face, its unformed features.
 
“This was your sister,” he tells us. “We’re gonna give her a name before we put her to rest.”
 
“What about Mamá?” I ask. “She gonna make it?”
 
Papá looks at the woman, who glances back at him and nods. He relays her nod to us.
 
We named her Petra. Papá digs the hole extra deep so the animals cannot get to her and carefully places her inside. We place stones over the scar in the earth as we pray. I feel a hot tear wind down my cheek.
 
Mamá’s womb remained empty for years after that, but when it was ready to accept life again it was blessed twofold. Aurelia and Pía. It is slaughter season, and Pablo and I shadow Papá as he kills, drains, and cleans the pigs. Juana and Diego, still too young to help, play in the clearing. Papá disappears around the back of the shack to find something.
 
“Edén,” Diego calls out to me.
 
“What?” I reply.
 
“Why does Papá walk like that?”
 
“Walk like what?” I know what he means, but hope he will catch my disinterest.
 
“Like he’s hurt.”
 
Pablo’s eyes roll toward the shack, where Mamá is working, seemingly every part of her swollen with the new lives she is about to bring forth, then meet mine. I stomp toward the two of them and cover his mouth with my hand.
 
“Don’t ask questions like that.”
 
“Let me go!”
 
“You’ll upset Mamá.”
 
“Stop!”
 
He bites my hand, and I send him backward into the dust. He cries, holding his bottom, and tears off toward the shack.

                                            **** 
 
I think Mamá’s latest nightmare has something to do with the visit from the trader the day before.
 
He and Papá are standing outside the shack, arms folded across their chests and their voices low, as I bring in the water. Both regard me for a moment and stop talking as I make my way toward the front steps; for a moment, I note their curious differences. They share the same dark hair and dark skin, and yet Papá’s features are softer, his hair a net of curls while the trader’s sticks out in straight, jagged tufts from under his hat. I noticed the same differences between Mamá and the woman who delivered us, who is the trader’s sister or cousin or some other relation, her sheets of hair always wrapped round and round into a knot at the back of her head. I hasten up the steps.
 
The murmurs begin again as the door closes behind me. Mamá has propped open the flap of wood that serves as our only window, and stray words leak in. “War.” “English.” “San Agustín.” “Cuba.” I recognize only the first, think about Jericho and Josué and his trumpets. A sound disrupts my sprawling thoughts. It is a sigh, almost a whimper, and I turn to find its source. Mamá has been sitting at the table, taking a break from her work, and she stares at the wall—in her trance—as if she is looking through it, to the trees just beyond it.
 
Tonight, I think I have seen a spirit. It was only for a moment, before it turned away and slipped between the trees, but it was a man, his skin pale and translucent. But he looks like no man I have ever seen, that is, he looks nothing like Papá or the trader or the other men Papá says are the trader’s kin, who I see hunting from time to time in the forest. Papá and Mamá have taught me that spirits are as much a part of the landscape as the creatures who dwell in the forest and in the swamp that rings our patch of land, though this is my first time seeing one. They are from the time before we returned to Edén, they explain, people who never accepted God or who were condemned to purgatory for their sins. My heart thumping, I scurry up toward the path to the shack before the sun goes down for good.
 
The fire is still going, though dinner was more than an hour ago. Mamá sits off to the side, the flames illuminating her face. Papá is silhouetted, his back to Mamá and the fire, and he glowers out on the trees. He does not look at me as I approach.
 
“Go find your siblings and get them ready for bed,” he commands.
 
“I saw a spirit,” I mention, my excitement somewhat diminished by the shortness in his tone. His eyes drop to the ground, but he says nothing, does not move. He and Mamá remain outside some time; their whispers awaken me as they grope through the darkness toward their own bed, some hours after the girls and I fell asleep in a tangle on our mattress, Pablo and Diego on theirs. I smell the smoke on their clothes as they pass.
 
I lay awake afterward, too hot and my mind too restless. Papá has left the flap open to allow in the fresh air, but it is just as stifling and heavy as that inside the shack. It is furious with the sounds of frogs and insects. Twigs snap as something moves through the trees at the edge of the clearing. Perhaps it is a deer or some sort of scavenger, or maybe even a puma attracted to the smell of the animals tucked safely away in their huts. The ruckus continues, and I roll to my side, trying to bury one ear into the pillow, press my fingers over the other. I hear Mamá or Papá turn over in their own bed as well.
 
My body lurches upward, and I realize I had drifted off, for how long I do not know. Papá and Pablo are sitting up too, and Mamá grasps onto Papá’s elbow, asking him what is wrong.
 
“I heard a voice,” I whisper to them.
 
“Me too,” Pablo says back.
 
“Stay where you are,” Papá orders as he tosses off the thin blanket covering him. Mamá remains paralyzed in her spot on the bed.
 
Papá prepares a lamp and edges toward the flap. He lets the orange ring of light spill onto the ground just outside the shack, moves it from left to right, opens the flap as far as it will go to gaze further into the darkness. Suddenly, he startles and drops the lamp, breaking it. The flap slaps shut.
 
“What is it?” Mamá hisses. “What did you see?”
 
“Boy, grab a knife,” he barks at Pablo, who complies. He selects one of the machetes hanging near the door, next to where Papá keeps the knives he uses to kill the pigs.
 
“What is it?” Mamá repeats.
 
“It’s them,” Papá utters, and there is panic in his voice. “They found us.”
 
My mouth is agape, wondering who he means, but Mamá must know for she hurries to the knives and selects her own. The younger children are awake now and squeak like baby birds over having been woken, asking their own questions about what is happening, but Mamá shushes them and herds them into her and Papá’s bed. I at last rise to my feet and grab my own knife, one of the ones I’ve seen Papá use to cut through bone, and shuffle back toward the other children, feeling stupid and helpless as I hover next to the bed, not quite sure how to wield my new weapon.
 
We hear it again, a voice, but this time there is another, and another, and still yet another—a whole chorus. Suddenly, all four walls of the shack begin to clatter with the sounds of fists and rocks and sticks against the boards. It stops just as abruptly. Laughter. I can hear them talking to one another, but I cannot understand them.
 
A high-pitched whoop pierces the thick air. One of them calls out in a strange chant, one that sounds like when Papá summons the pigs to their slop. The banging and cackling begin again, until I think the shack will come down. Mamá is praying under her breath, the knife clutched between her palms. Papá and Pablo have barricaded the door with the table and chairs, and hold them in place as the boards rattle around us. Papá glances back at Mamá, who opens her eyes and stares back at him. It is like they are communicating.
 
“Come on, now,” Mamá says, and she starts pulling boards from their place in the floor, as if by some god-like strength. Papá nods at Pablo and he joins her. Finally, when they have removed about half a dozen boards or so, she gathers all of us around her.
 
“Pablo, Edén—take your brother and sisters and follow the swamp south. Just stick to the water, and you’ll find Cesar’s village,” she tells us, referring to the trader.
 
She pushes Pablo through the hole and under the house first, then me. Papá has built the shack up so high on its stilts in case of a flood that I can almost stand my full height under there. Mamá begins to toss the smaller children to us, who lay down in the dirt on their stomachs and wait for directions. I can feel spider webs on my skin and I am certain that their occupants have crawled into my hair and clothes. My skin begins to itch. All six of us in the hole now, we look through the panels; torchlight seeps from the front of the shack, and all of the commotion now seems gathered around the door. I crawl over and peer between the panels: there are one-two-three-four-five-six figures hovering just behind the torches. Their skin is illuminated, pale—spirits. I gasp.
 
Pablo carefully removes a panel on the furthest most corner from the noise and ushers us through it, and we run into the darkness. We stumble through the forest toward the swamp, tripping on roots and fallen branches and bushes, until we can hear the voices no more.
 
We drift so far into the forest that not even the slightest of light can pierce through the canopy, and we must wait until dawn before we can continue. The younger children sleep in the branches of a drooping old oak. Eventually, we follow the blue haze of twilight toward the water. My head floats with hunger. The sun has reached its highest point when we find a gathering of shelters near the marsh, and filled with a newfound panic, we shout and run toward them. Their inhabitants meet us as we approach, bewildered. We collapse at their feet, panting and sobbing and still shouting.
 
“Cesar,” I say again and again, hoping that we have found the right place.
 
It is some time before I see him rushing toward us, some of the other villagers having gone to fetch him. Some of the women have managed to calm us and now sit with the twins in their laps, holding food for them as they eat. The rest of us sit in the dirt, still shaking, partaking in our own meals. We tell him what happened, and he wipes a hand over his face.
 
Cesar invites us into his family’s home, and it is days before I am able to rise. Later, Cesar’s wife will tell me that I slept for some three days. Diego and the twins soon develop fevers, and they remain that way nearly a month, as the first illness begets another.
 
Some of the men, led by Cesar, go to look for Papá and Mamá. But the shack has been burned, the animals run off, our parents vanished.
 
A couple weeks after we fled, Cesar summons Pablo and me to his boat, but offers no explanation as he pushes off from the shore. Some half-hour into our journey, more shacks rise from the marshes, and surprise and dismay and even a sense of betrayal wash over me. The inhabitants look like us, and a few wave to Cesar as we pass. We disembark and he takes us to a home near the center of the settlement, where a man stands outside waiting for us, arms crossed. Cesar introduces him as Señor Padilla.
 
“Come on,” Padilla says, “We got a lot to talk about.”
 
Padilla invites us to sit on a couple of logs he has converted into seats around his family’s firepit, then takes his own. His wife pushes a couple of clay bowls into our hands, fills it with some sort of rice dish.
 
“I knew your father,” he tells us. “We served together, over in San Agustín.” He reviews the blank expressions on our faces. “But I gather he never told you about any of that.
 
“He still came here, once in a while. I told him he should move here with the rest of us, that it would be safer, that we could protect one another, but he refused. He and your mother thought they knew a better way to protect you.”
 
“From what?” Pablo asks.
 
“The truth,” Padilla snorts, “the past. Their past. I thought they were crazy.” For a moment, I remember Mamá and her dolls made from dough.
 
His eyes pass from my face to Pablo’s. They are sharp, impatient, yet read of pity.
 
“Look, I don’t know what all your parents told you, but we—all of us,” he gestures to the other shacks, “We were born into bondage. Up in South Carolina. That’s a colony up north, belongs to the King of England.”
 
I think about Hagar and Moses and the exodus and the destruction of Jerusalem and the re-enslavement of the Israelites…
 
“But the King of Spain, he said that if we ran away here to Florida, we’d be free, so long as we became Catholic and served in his military. That’s how I met your father—doing my military service, over in San Agustín. It was our job to defend the city against the English. He got hurt, during one skirmish. I’m sure you saw how he walked. But we did our job, and then we were free. And most of us, we came and settled out here, but your parents, they went out even further. They didn’t want anything to remind them of what they left, didn’t want you to know about a time we were anything but free. Not til you were older, anyway.”
 
He trails off, taken over by his thoughts. We continue to eat. Finally, he takes a deep breath, as though he’s been holding it this whole time, and shifts in his seat.
 
“The English. That’s probably who attacked you all. They made an agreement with the king: they get San Agustín, he gets Cuba. I’ve seen a few of them the last couple of weeks, sneaking around the marshes. Probably fixing to take us back up to South Carolina or Georgia. We don’t intend to stay to find out. We’re going down to Cuba. All of us. I think you all should come with us.”
 
Pablo finishes his meal and sets the bowl down beside him, and leaning forward, he looks into Padilla’s eyes as if it hurts him, as if he is starting into the sun. “Our people—we got any people here?”
 
Padilla pauses. “Not that I know of. Your father, he made the journey by himself. I don’t know much about your mother, except that she came here from South Carolina, too. They met at church, there in San Agustín.” He stretches his legs out in front of him, inspects his boots. “But we’d look after you. Make sure you all have what you need.”
 
I am hollow as Cesar takes us back to his village. I mull Padilla’s revelations. Renacido—that is our family name, we learned, one Papá gave himself after he crossed into Florida. And I think about Padilla’s proposal, about Cuba. Maybe Mamá and Papá escaped and are already headed there.
 
Or maybe they are out wandering in the forest, like Adán and Eva, exiled from their beloved garden. Maybe they have been taken back to South Carolina, like Padilla said would happen to us. Or maybe they are dead. And maybe the way to honor them is to return to their land, land they owned, and rebuild the shack and pens and gardens, or if not there, then in the jungle that surrounded it, feral. Or maybe it really is to go to Cuba, to tend our parents’ legacy like an ember until its flames are full. To not merely survive. I close my eyes, and I see Mamá’s hands forming figures in the soil. “God gave us a second chance.”

C.L. Martín is a descendant of farm laborers who first arrived in the United States from Mexico in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, her Arizona-born grandparents were forced to settle in Mexico as part of the so-called “repatriation” of more than one million people of Mexican descent, sixty-percent of whom are believed to have been American citizens. They permanently resettled in California in 1961, where Martín was born and raised. She went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in English and History, with a focus in creative writing, from Mills College. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as an attorney and continues to write short fiction. This is her first time getting published.