​"Death Eye Dog, Xolotl, cried so much when the last world, the world of the Fourth Sun ended, that his eyes fell out of his sockets."

by Michelle Robles-Wallace
​
"Death Eye Dog" was a runner up in the 2018 Extra Fiction Contest. See here to read the first, second, and third winning entries and stay tuned for this year's upcoming Extra Fiction Contest.

​Mictlán, barren land of darkness and skeletons, the deepest level of the underworld, rests nine worlds beneath our own. The dead take a full four years to journey there; the living never go. At the first level of the underworld, the Mexica dead, if they are lucky, pick up a dog to guide them through the harrowing dangers of the underworld.

​Houses are lonely when they are no longer homes and nightfall makes the emptiness rattle. Raul walks in the night with his dog. He wears too-big, hooded sweatshirts that hide his face in darkness. This part of San Francisco is grey. The fog dampens the cold, streetlights dim the darkness and the smell of urine rises thick from the pavement. The only glitter comes from the glass chips in the sidewalk that shine in the momentary light of passing cars.

Raul walks smooth and towers over most people on the street. His arms are heavy and solid; his eyes are tired and full of unshed tears. He carries arrugas on his face so deep they sometimes appear as folds. He lives alone; even when among friends and family, he resists communion. Solid as his name, stonecold, like a fallen star who has forgotten how to shine. It is as if he wears a cloak, a tangle of scars of loss that hide the glow of his heart.

Passersby slink away from the walking duo.

Death Eye Dog sinks over the horizon with the morning light. Xolotl, the evening star, hangs heavy in the night sky, demands notice as soon as the bright rays of the sun sink beneath the horizon.

Death Eye Dog, Xolotl, cried so much when the last world, the world of the Fourth Sun ended, that his eyes fell out of his sockets.

Blind, Xolotl guided his brother, Morning Star, into the depths of Mictlán after the Fourth Sun ended in flood. The waters washed all the dead to the underworld, returning the people to their spiritual home of darkness. None were left to remake the world of the Fifth Sun anew. Morning Star, Quetzlcoatl, guided by Evening Star, Xolotl, descended to Mictlán, land of darkness and skeletons. Human bones covered the ground. Quetzlcoatl slashed his wrists, anointing the bones with his life-giving blood.

Xolotl, Death Eye Dog, gathered up the bones in his mouth, carried them from the underworld back to the material world to remake mankind in the fifth and final age of the Sun.

Raul knew a different life before this life he lives now. He had a wife, he had a daughter: he had a home. They are as gone now as if the flood of the Fourth Sun had come and washed them away.

Untethered, he never cried, gritted his teeth instead and convinced himself not to feel. Stonecold. Emotion oozes out the cracks though, or explodes in sudden unpredictable bursts. The dog was to take the edge off alone, off loss, off untethered.

His pit bull is rowdy. Rambunctious. They hold the opposite ends of the leash and pull and pull and pull. Neither ever gives in, even when Raul raises his arm up over his head hauling the dog several feet off the ground.

Raul lowers him down, lays his broad hand on the dog’s head. He doesn’t push down but lets its weight be enough to make the dog submit and release the leash.

His submissions are only momentary: he knows who is boss, but only in the practical matters of food and shelter. That pit never stops being his own dog. He mischieves all the time.    

The dog too is big, he is lean and narrow, but tall, taller than pit bulls are expected to be. Raul and the dog’s eyes are the same color hazel, only the dog’s are full of joy and love and play.

A gap begs a bridge between the two, a guided path from the terrible cloak of Raul’s to the dog’s incorrigible joy. Raul ought to be blind with tears by now, instead his eyes hang heavy at the edges, as if carrying a great weight. He goes about now in a darkness as bleak as Mictlán, in a darkness as tight as a straitjacket.

From Mictlán it is possible to rise again as butterfly or bird, to resurrect oneself.
From loss it is possible to rebuild your life.

Winter rebirths spring swells into summer sheds into autumn returns to the barrenness of winter.

Wintertime, darktimes, where it appears that all is lost and nothing moves are crucial times. The earth restores during winter. Its faith never flails at the darkest time of night, during that hour before the sun sets a blood red glow on the horizon, knowing that it must arrive at those dark depths before bursting forth into spring.

Too, to rebirth from the underworld, the dead must first arrive at the depths of Mictlán.

Raul got his dog after he returned from family back to one. Something warm and alive to love in the hardest time of unknowing what next, something to care for when the dawn was nothing to set his cap at, a guide for the darkest parts of night. He lacks the morning star, the blood of life that ushers in a new dawn.

Stonecold, Raul forgets to look for the sun rising, for the red glow on the horizon. He spends his days waiting for it to be night and the night to be day, until the time that will pass, does. He tries to form a new family, one of friends, stopgaps living with partying, something to fill the time and space. The gap between he and the dog becomes an abyss, slowly, like water run through a crevice carves out a canyon.
Raul and his dog walk up 21st street, past the crowded-at-night basketball courts, the stoops where people sit, talking, drinking and hollering out to passersby. He had set out for a walk to take the chill off alone, but the darkness presses tight. They turn onto Mission, head over to a bar where a friend bartends. Raul ties his dog up outside and walks in to where a beer and a shot of tequila are sliding across the bar to him as soon as his shadow fills the doorway.

It is Guillermo’s bar, meaning, the bar where Guillermo works, not a bar that Guillermo owns. The lights are dim and throw a reddish cast to the bar, except for the bright white light that highlights the rows of bottles. There they are, working and playing, all his crew, and Miguel shouts, “Eh, man, where’d you crawl out from. You missed a great party last week, ha! Ask Devon ‘bout it,” then starts laughing maniacally, like a machine gun. Raul asks, and Guillermo sets out a row of shot glasses, fills them with tequila and then everyone reaches in and grabs one, throws them back and then gets back to work on their beers.

Devon launches into a story, “So this girl, I see her and she looks amazing and she’s alone so I give her a lil’ tap, just a tap not even on her ass, but on her hip, and then this guy over on the couch starts glaring at me and comes over and pushes me across the table,” and Guillermo starts laughing, “and I came in and—”
“Dude, shut up, I’m telling the story and—,”

And Raul’s eyes are lit up, anointed by the liquor, “Hey Guillermo, how about another round over here,” because that’s what they do, is keep going until Guillermo calls last call and then the crowd spills out onto the street, leaving just him and his boys and they head into the back and do some lines and their speech becomes sharp like knives and their laughter like metal and they leave, finally, and head over to where Miguel knows somebody spinning and it’s going to be good, man, and they go and they stay, inside in the dark cut with bright pulsating lights even while sun rises, bloodred, spilling dawn over the land. 

Michelle Marie Robles Wallace is working on a collection of short stories set along the borderlands, a memoir and a YA novel. She has published short fiction, CNF and journalism and is particularly interested in themes of healing and borders. She has an MFA and is the recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artists Grant, a Writers' Grotto Writing Fellowship, and hosted the Borderlands Lectura.   ​

by Carmen Baca 

"La Muñeca" was a runner up in the 2018 Extra Fiction Contest
See here to read the first, second, and third winning entries and stay tuned for this year's upcoming Extra Fiction Contest.

​The redness of the flames stood out vividly against the blackness of the night. They rose from the open windows of the façade of the building front like multi-colored streamers from the Día de los Muertos celebrations in their varied hues of red, orange, yellow, even green and blue closer to the source of the fire. As if the Devil and his armies were celebrating some spectacular event in the old, formerly grand hotel, the sporadic flashes from within announced with small explosions that something else had just been consumed by the hungry beast. The roar was like nothing before heard in the town center, only on the outskirts if one stood close to the rail line when the Big Chief passenger train rushed through without stopping. If Hades could be imagined by humans, perhaps then this came close. Sudden flares rose through the roof and burst into flying embers and sparks rivaling the best Fourth of July fireworks display.   

Flames rose so high in the sky that night that people who lived in the hilly area south of the town could see, and many a head of the household left their comfy casitas to rush to the rescue while others simply went to have first-hand reports to tell anyone who would listen in the days to come. That is the way of human nature: some true altruists rush into the fray without stopping to consider their own safety while others seek their fifteen minutes of fame by being the center of attention when news, mitote (gossip,) or innuendo of any kind presents itself. It wasn’t until these two kinds of people reached the town plaza that they discovered the majestic and historic Casa Encantada was so engulfed in flames that they didn’t think even one wall would survive. 

​Earlier, three permanent inhabitants of the hotel began their day in their normal fashion: conversation, introspection, and reflection. They wandered through the halls and rooms of the building without constraint and only caused small gasps or shivers in the people they encountered occasionally. The younger of the trio loved yerba buena which she found growing in the patio and enjoyed blowing a breath of mint-scented air in the faces of the people she passed in the hall just for fun to watch their eyes widen, their mouths fall open, and their bodies shake themselves like a dog after taking a swim. Aside from curling up in the window alcove with a good book, that was one of the ways she entertained herself since going to school or anywhere else was out of the question.
​
When darkness began to replace the dusk of the late afternoon, the girl’s two adult companions sat in the parlor of the suite they inhabited. The lady’s laughter trickling from the second floor was so lovely it sounded like crystal chimes in a light breeze to the young man walking below the open window. When he glanced up, she moved back into the room. “Not again,” she giggled. “Reminds me of how I almost gave myself away when you caused Nicola to stumble upon the staircase the day of the quinceañera. I was afraid she was going to fall and hurt herself—all because you wanted a better vantage point.”

“That was a close one,” her husband, Señor Theodoro Barela, agreed. “I tried to push against her with my arm so she wouldn’t fall forward. I was trying to get out of the woman’s view, but she still caught my image in her camera.”
“You are not the only one in the photographs,” Señora Romulda Barela added with sudden solemnity. “The photo of the three of us must have caused much consternation among Nicola’s people.”

The young subject of their discourse walked into the room, carrying her rag doll in one arm as she usually did. Had she lived with her parents, it was unlikely she’d still be attached to the special symbol of what she’d left behind. She sat on the settee, the very same one where she’d been pretending to sleep when the couple appeared before her and asked if she was ready to join them that night several years before.
“That’s the one action I still have difficulty feeling good about,” Nicola sighed. “That I caused my mother such pain by leaving with you that night.”

The couple exchanged a concerned glance.

Nicola looked out the window down at the plaza and the townspeople of Mariposa. “But I’m sure the pain she would’ve felt seeing me get sicker every day with an incurable illness would’ve been worse. I’m content to be here with you and to catch an occasional glimpse of her when she comes to the plaza.”

The three sat in pensive silence as they watched the people of the town come and go in the early coolness of the evening. They were unable to leave the confines of the hotel, but they spent much of their days by the windows looking at people doing simple activities like walking, window shopping, visiting with others on the park benches, or playing with their children and pets on the green lawns in the summers or in the pristine snow of the winters. The couple had inhabited the hotel for over a hundred years while the girl had only been there for five. They were ghosts of the people they once were, but they existed just as sure as any of the humans they observed. Theirs was a quiet afterlife, and they were as content as they could be, given their circumstances.

But the trio didn’t know their happy ethereal existence in the historic hotel was about to come to an end. Left unattended for but a few minutes, hot grease in a skillet bubbled up and splattered on a dish towel someone had carelessly left by the stove. The chef and his two assistants were in the stockroom nearby taking inventory and preparing a grocery list. None knew a grease fire was searching for oxygen in the kitchen. By the time one of the men smelled the burning oil and they scrambled back into the cocina to tackle the flames, some had already begun to consume the nearby window curtains. The busboy opening the swinging door to the dining area created just the right amount of air flow to fan the hungry beast. With a sudden whoosh, the starving fire flashed into an explosion and before anyone could take action, the blaze engulfed the entire room.

The conflagration found more air through the open door to the dining area and the sparks jumped like lively, devilish creatures from furniture to carpet. Freed from any constraints, the embers soon followed, rolling along the wood floor and leaving more sparks to ignite. The employees at and around the reservation desk heard the roar of the hungry monster. Just as their attention flew in the direction of the wide entrance to the dining room, they felt the heat and saw the rising swirls of black smoke coming toward them at the same time the tongues of searing flames burst through. Cries of alarm rose in crescendo like the fire truck would only a few minutes later. Everyone rushed to the bar behind the reservation desk and ran through the exit to raise the cry of “Fire!”

The fire department was just down the block, but by the time the small engine got into place, the entire first floor was rapidly being devoured by the hungry conflagration. The guests and employees in the upper four stories evacuated quickly through the exterior fire escapes, so not a soul was lost that they knew of. Most of the back of the building suffered most of the damage when all was over. But the water damage and the blows of the bomberos’ axes made the building uninhabitable. The Casa Encantada closed its doors that day, leaving the three spiritual inhabitants alone.

Afterward, it stood abandoned but fenced in to prevent hoboes from attempting to live there and to deter any of the neighborhood adolescents from daring one another to explore, to vandalize, and most importantly, to become hurt by the fragility of the frame. Of the former classic and sophisticated building, only the front remained, like a painted façade of a movie set with nothing much behind to hold it up. The rear was reduced to a skeleton; in some areas only the basic framework of the exterior walls still stood. The wood was blackened, charred so badly in some places one had only to give a slight push and it cracked, splintered, and fell. During the night sometimes in the slightest breeze, neighbors heard the crash of another piece of lumber and shook their heads in dismay that the city leaders didn’t just tear it all down before someone was hurt.

Several months later Señor and Señora Barela and their young charge, Nicola, sat in the small space left relatively untouched by the fire, the parlor where they’d been conversing when the blaze began.

“Are we to reside here in this one cramped room for the rest of eternity?” Nicola asked, plopping down on her favorite window seat with her doll in her lap.

“Since we can’t leave this building, I don’t see any alternative, mi hita,” the elder man replied. “You know we have tried to go beyond our limited confines and what happens when we do.”

The lady sighed and shook her head. “Esposo querido, I cannot stay here, not like this.” She stood and waved her hand to the charred and water-damaged walls. “I am sure this frame will fall before long or will be torn down by the town fathers. It is time to leave this earth and welcome what awaits us in the next phase of our existence. Please, join me in this, mi amor.”
Sadness came to his face and made its home in the dying sparkle of his eyes, the downward turn of his lips, and in the resigned shrug of his shoulders as he finally nodded in acquiescence. “You are right. I know you are. We’ve spent too much time here already and have been of assistance to only a few others from this place.”

He recalled the custodian whom they’d saved over seventy years ago and who had already made his way to his own afterlife. There was also the hobo who’d come into the patio nearly fifty years before and also left his earthly existence for what came after only ten years later. There were several others, but nowhere as many had they been in a larger city and been able to leave the confines of the hotel. So much time had passed, neither he nor his wife could even remember why they were restricted to the walls of the previously large and comfortable building they called home for over a century.

“When would you like to go?”   
“Well, we’ve made up our minds. What’s wrong with tomorrow? Let us enjoy our last night here, for we don’t know whether we will be together after we leave.”
“I guess I’m ready too,” Nicola sighed. Her face was a reflection of the man’s, her eyes sad and her mouth trembling from the cries which gathered in the back of her throat.

The older couple comforted her as best they could, trying to be optimistic about their future together even though neither knew what was ahead. They’d lived good lives on earth when they were alive and expected that surely what they’d done as spiritual beings would count for something. They never knew why they had been unable to move forward previously, only existing to help those whom they could without question. The burning pyre which had consumed their home and their inability to move elsewhere on earth left them no choice but to move on.

The three spent the rest of the night in more conversation, reminiscing about their pasts with equal parts of laughter and sorrow until the fingers of the dawn began to part the curtains of darkness and sunrise was imminent. They enjoyed one last group hug, holding one another tightly and then moving to the first floor to stand before the front doors with clasped hands.
“Ready, my loves?” Señor Barela asked.
“I am.”
“Me too.”

With Señor Barela on the left and his wife between them, Nicola clutched her precious muñeca in one arm, wondering if somehow, some way, the doll would accompany her to her next destination. Not wanting to let either of his companions’ hands go, the Señor touched the tip of his boot to each door to get them to open. They stepped outside into the welcome warmth of the sun and lifted their faces to the rays which enfolded the three for the first time since each had died. For only a moment they stood still, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, they took a few steps more, and a few more until they reached the center of the park. They were allowed to feel the sunlight on their faces and arms, to take deep breaths of the freshness of the air, and to enjoy one last time the feel of the grass beneath their feet, their sight of the green foliage and trees and the bountiful and beautiful hues and scents of the flowers—and they were gone. No fanfare of angels’ trumpets, no clap of thunder, no opening in the clouds revealed the stairway to heaven. But the gated doors opened wide, and the saints were there to welcome the couple as they passed.

Nicola was not so lucky. Perhaps the powers which govern life, death, and the afterlife decided it was not her time. Perhaps she had unfulfilled duties on earth. But when the señor and his señora ascended through the gates to meet their Maker and to receive answers to all their questions, she was not with them.

The neighborhood kids, Anselmo, Gabriel, and Guillermo, decided on a dare several weeks later to pass through a loose board in the fence which enclosed the remains of the hotel.

​They were joined by the only girl they considered a friend, Carlotta, whom they called Charlie. Truthfully, she blackmailed them into letting her accompany them or they most likely would’ve left her behind. But there they were, the four of them, sneaking through the opening and prowling amongst the ruins for any treasures they might find. Of course, there wasn’t much on the ground. And everything was soot-covered, so touching anything left them with black fingers.
When Guillermo was the first to wipe his hand on his pants, it was Charlie who reminded him to “wash” the hollín off with dirt instead. Otherwise, their parents would all know where they’d been, and they wouldn’t be able to get away with coming back.

Other than a few coins, a couple of candle holders only partially melted, and a little metal box, they didn’t find much of value. Charlie went in one direction and the boys went opposite. She came upon a fallen chest of drawers, opening first one drawer after the other until she came to the last. A raggedy doll with only a touch of smoke damage looked up at her from the folds of a baby blanket in which it had been wrapped. She joined the boys shortly after.

“Look what I found,” she announced and held the doll up so they could see.
The boys were unimpressed, hoping she had found something of value they could pawn.
“Let’s use it for target practice,” Anselmo made to grab it with one hand while holding up his slingshot with the other.
“No!” Charlie yanked the doll to her chest to keep it safe. “I’m gonna give it to myhermanita.” And with that, she left the boys behind, taking the callejones behind the houses all the way home so no one would see her carrying a doll. She had her reputation to maintain.

Her little sister, Augusta, was only four. But she rarely spoke. She wasn’t mute, according to the doctors, nor was she simple-minded. She simply chose not to communicate with words when her actions could convey what she wanted. She had no friends since to be a friend requires some kind of communication, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she preferred her own company to that of others, except Charlie, and even then, only periodically, like when Charlie read to her at night or taught her to play jacks or some other game.

So when Charlie got home, she slipped quietly into the bathroom, washed the grime from the rag doll, and hung it to dry in her closet until the following day. That morning after breakfast, she found Augusta in her room quietly playing with her Susie Q doll. She presented the homely but somewhat homey muñeca to the little girl and told her the doll was special. She told Augusta she could tell the doll her secrets and the muñeca would keep them. Thinking that perhaps the doll could help to get the little one to talk more and perhaps be a conduit to communicating with other little girls, she made up a detail which she’d come to regret years later. She told Augusta the doll was magical and would help her learn to speak better.

From that day, the muñeca became Augusta’s constant companion. Charlie’s plan had backfired. Augusta didn’t want any human company once the doll came into her possession. She named it Esther, and when anyone asked how she came upon such an unusual choice, she always replied that the doll told her. After a month her parents thought perhaps the way she cared for, spoke to, and carried the thing everywhere was unhealthy. Truly, it appeared the doll communicated in some way as the child would whisper to it and incline her head as if listening to a quiet reply.

If the adults tried to take Esther away, Augusta’s cries were so forlorn they ended up giving it back before too long. Thinking they were making too much out of it, her parents convinced themselves she’d outgrow the muñeca with time or it would eventually fall apart. After all, it was a rag doll. 

Another year passed and still Augusta and her Esther doll were constant companions.

Though her parents were dismayed that their daughter was still too attached to the thing and that said cosa had grown no more tattered or ragged than it was when she got it, they welcomed the opportunity which arose that would allow them to separate the two. The little girl started school, and her parents insisted she leave her doll behind. Between them, Charlie, and other well-meaning family members supplying various reasons why Nicola couldn’t accompany her to school, Augusta finally relented. But she explained in as little words as possible the reason why, and it had nothing to do with any of theirs: “Esther says it’s okay.”

While she was away at escuela, her mother, Guadalupita, Pita for short, did what many mothers did in the fifties— cleaned, cooked, and enjoyed her hobbies: sewing, gardening, and crocheting. Her life was fairly uneventful, and she enjoyed it that way. Her adolescent and early adult years had had traumatic events, so she was content to have nothing of importance to contend with—nothing with life or death issues. Would that she had been able to see the future. Oftentimes, life’s lessons come in hindsight, and sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to our instinct, our own intuition to heed those little hairs that rise on the back of our necks or on our arms when we get that feeling people call “someone passing over our graves.”

So when a few days after Augusta started school and the strange phenomenon began, she tried to shake off any concern. Pita, leaving the room Augusta shared with Charlie, caught in the corner of her eye something moving. The act happened so quickly that when she turned, it had stopped. There was no window where she looked, nothing like a fluttering curtain to have captured her attention. Blinking her eyes and attributing it to exhaustion or imagination, she forgot about it.

Until the next time a week later. And the time after that. And...  She noted that every single time, the Esther doll was the object of her attention. There were instances where she’d leave the doll in one place only to discover it had moved. Telling herself she only forgot she’d left the thing there and instead had left it somewhere else, she tried to convince herself the muñeca had no powers.

But then she stopped a few weeks later to reflect about that: powers. Powers? She knew from the first she’d sensed in the doll something so mesmerizing her own daughter clung to it like a drug. Never far from the Esther doll, Augusta always kept it in her sight, perhaps afraid they’d try to sneak it away from her. When she held it, her little girl seemed to be at peace.

When she whispered to her doll, she inclined her head to place her ear close to its mouth as though listening closely to whatever she imagined (and surely it had to come from her imagination). And she wore such an expression of contentment that one would’ve thought the angels of the Lord were speaking to her. That was the moment of revelation for Guadalupita.

The doll wasn’t cursed; it was blessed. She didn’t know how or why, but if the doll insisted it was Esther and had such a positive influence on her daughter as to cause her to wear that look of bliss on her face, who was she to say otherwise? The muñeca hadn’t done anything, had not endangered Augusta or any of them. She’d merely satisfied some need in her daughter that human interaction or contact didn’t.

That very day she entered the girls’ bedroom and picked Esther up. Staring into her cross-stitched eyes, Pita was surprised to see a sort of compassion and when she held the doll close, it actually felt as if Esther’s little arms moved, as if she wanted to embrace the woman back. But instead of fear, a sudden and overwhelming feeling of absolute contentment came over her, as if the doll extended her sympathy for Pita’s past traumas and tried to offer empathy for what was and for what would come.

She tried and failed to explain to her husband later and resorted to leading him by the hand to the girls’ room, pushing him to sit on Charlie’s bed and placing Esther in his arms. She left him alone. It wasn’t long before he joined her in the kitchen where he put the beer back in the fridge and instead opted for a glass of cold water. The look on his face told her what she needed to know.

Since the girls were still at school, they rushed the doll to their parish priest and had him bless Esther for their own peace of mind. Father Carlos didn’t feel any kind of trepidation when he held it, and nothing happened at the church to any of them. Any concerns they had dissipated, and they were instead convinced they’d been right. They never spoke of what they did to their girls; they never mentioned it to anyone.

So the first two years of Augusta’s education passed without incident. She found school delightful and indeed made a few friends. Esther was still an important confidante, and both Charlie and Pita laughed between themselves that soon Augusta would confide in her doll about which boy she should return attention to of the upcoming suitors she’d be sure to attract.

That was not to be, however.

On the very anniversary of the day Señor and Señora Barela had entered their heavenly home, Augusta disappeared from her swing under the large apple tree in her family’s backyard. She was gone without a trace. Investigations from every jurisdiction in the city came together; searches yielded nothing. The parents, clearly heartbroken, were cleared. So were her sister, friends, neighbors, and even acquaintances. No suspects came to light, no leads developed—there was no closure, as they say. The entire town wanted to know what happened, especially in light of the disappearance of the little girl for that ill-fated quinceañera of five years before.

When Nicola’s parents heard about Augusta, they paid the De La Cruz parents a visit.

Nicola’s mother, Hortencia, disclosed that Esther was Nicola’s third name, her confirmation name. Her full name as recorded in her birth certificate was Nicola Frances Esther De La Cruz.

As for the muñeca, it was the one given to Nicola by the quinceañera herself, Marguerite Quintanilla, her own cousin. They proved it with a photograph from the event. Pita nearly fainted at the confirmation. Hortencia saw how deeply she had been affected and gave her one of three similar photos as a gesture of comfort.

However, no amount of rationalization on anyone’s parts could satisfy everyone with a plausible explanation—not the two sets of parents, not the authorities, nor the priest or the bishop when contacted. Sometimes those of us who live by our faith in a higher power have to accept that there are certain aspects of life, death, or the beyond which we do not have the capacity to understand. This was one of those times. No one could confirm what happened with Nicola or Augusta, or even with Esther, the muñeca, who had disappeared with her owner. The town fathers brought in their heavy equipment and their city employees and cleared out the remains of the hotel, sifting through every little pile to satisfy everyone that the girls and the doll were not somehow there. Though no rational explanation of why anyone thought they might was provided, it was something everyone wanted done.

There were only two mothers who shared a secret the next day after construction on the rebuilding of Casa Encantada began, which was the day after they had exchanged a special photograph. Before bed that night, Pita had sat with the photo in her hand. After a moment she felt a weight lift from her shoulders, and her headache, which had arrived with a vengeance the day her little girl went missing, also went away.

​She felt at peace and went immediately to bed. In her dreams Augusta came to explain that the muñeca had held the spirit of the little girl who vanished before she did. She made her mother understand that Nicola would have spent her short life in the agony of a fatal illness, and that angels had offered her a way to escape into heaven to avoid not only her own pain, but that of her mother and father.

They would have been helpless to help her, which would have hurt them in so many ways. And she was afraid they’d experience hopelessness and lose their faith. Departing as she did allowed her to leave her parents with their faith that what happened would be part of God’s plan and accept it.

Nicola’s spirit had remained in the muñeca to offer the same help to the next little girl who was fated to meet her. Nicola confirmed that Augusta was soon to have become ill; she would’ve died before the end of the year. Nicola had done what she needed to leave this plane and emerge whole and healthy in the next; she saved another as she had been saved. As for the muñeca, let’s just add a little warning here if we may. If you come across a raggedy-looking doll with cross-stitch eyes in the newly constructed Casa Encantada, you might think twice before picking her up. 

By Tania Romero
​

​By Carolina Rivera
     Each time the brutish blows resounded on the door of his mother’s house, he ran to hide under his childhood bed. That’s how life had been for the month since he got cut off from the organizations after the offensive at the end of January 1981. The year would be decisive for the country and for him, for those people who wanted change, the year of the offensive, the year of the revolution of the reddening moon that would lay out hundreds of barely armed high school and university students into the gutters of San Salvador.
     His mother had told him that Carlos, with whom he had escaped soldiers in hilly Colonia Escalón, had been captured in those days when summer wind moves moaning tree branches, the month of January 1981. The soldiers’ leaden eyes were searching, and they followed Carlos to his home. They took him out and burned him alive along with his girlfriend in front of families to bind them with fear. Streets of the capital breathed in repression through the barrel of a rifle and were camouflaged in olive green, where most young people walked as though drawn by wires so as not to raise any suspicion.
     They knock on the door again; he hides; they leave. Now lying on the floor he examines rusty springs and wonders how long it will take them to find him, and how he will flee from this. The streets are dressed with soldiers and whistle-blowing informants. Just stepping out of the house, they’ll shoot him down. “How stupid. How could I come home for Mamá to hide me?” There was no other safe place at the time. Surrounded in that house, he is a fugitive in his own home, an exile in his own country. “Mamá will not let me go.”
     There, from under his bed, he also sees the ceiling of his house, where he once dreamed that the sky was a blackboard on which girls and boys painted a rainbow, where they learned to read and write. This is the bed he and his brother shared when he started storing memory at five years of age. A memory flourishes at playing the game of cat and mouse, of hide and seek. They never caught him, but now he was not so sure of his game, and the cat was not his brother. These cats have become vultures with rifles.
     “Stop, stop jumping. You’re going to break the bed, and then you’ll have to go back to sleeping on the floor like before. There is no money to buy another. Look, the mattress is already torn.” He hears his young mother’s voice yelling at them. He sighs guiltily as the memory of her scolding dissolves. Completely still, his fingers feel the space where his father set up the bed fifteen years ago. With a thin smile and one eye half-open looking up at the mattress, he realizes why he felt backaches every morning about which he never complained, because the pains were never as strong as the joy of having a bed with a mattress; that was greater than any annoying spring touching his back. “The springs of this thin mattress were almost touching my face. Mother must have put things on the bed to hide me better when they get here.”
     He hears again violent knocking and feels there is no escape. He can reach out to touch his mother’s weak, nervous pacing. She has enough force to get to the door. Lying on the icy floor of interwoven red and green bricks, he enjoys momentarily the peach-colored light of noon seep through the crack in the door as mother barely lets it open. Filtering through the light come three violent shadows that push the door against his mother.
     He becomes silent as the icy floor where he lies. Courage becomes thin as the mattress where he has slept since he was five. Watch the evil black boots, hungry for searching. They are the mocking vultures, pecking with hate at the home to find him. In seconds, the bed goes crash flying across the room. He feels as if naked without it. He does not move. His mother cries. A rifle butt silences her. He lies there, face toward the ceiling, still as though the bed is still upon him. He does not feel the blow of rifle butt on his face. Nor does he feel his head when they crash it on the edge of the bed. They drag him.
     “Would he sleep in his bed or dream again...”

​Carolina Rivera, a native of El Salvador, lives in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. A graduate student in English Literature at UCLA, she began work on a collection of short stories as a Fellow in the Pen Center USA Rosenthal Foundation Emerging Voices Program. Also involved in filmmaking, she finished a documentary,Manlio Argueta Poets and Volcanoes, in 2010. Another short story, "The Funeral," is part of the anthology Strange Cargo by Pen Center USA, Emerging Voices.

Ballad of a Slopsucker

The parking lot at Horatio’s was packed for the ten-year reunion of San Leandro High’s Class of ’87 and Elvis Borboa—who had been voted Most Likely to Be on MTV his senior year—sat in his car near the back of the lot, sucking on a cigarette like nicotine was oxygen. An hour before, he had stood in front of his closet mirror wondering, Should I stay or should I go? He tried on shirt after shirt until he narrowed it down to two—a long-sleeve button-down shirt so it’d look like he had made something of himself, or a striped polo shirt that said I-don’t-really-give-a-shit-about-appearances-but-I’ll-look-presentable. No matter which one he wore, Elvis saw a twenty-eight-year-old straight-edge Latino reflected back to him—the cropped hair, fitted jeans, and a shirt that covered the flaming skull tattoo on his right shoulder. As he stared at himself, he couldn’t help but wonder if the teenage, fuck-authority version of himself would have hated who he had become: just another tool; another sellout working for a big bank.

While he sat in his new Honda Accord, he couldn’t shake the nervous, twisted feeling in his stomach. He popped the Eagles’s Greatest Hits into the CD player. He skipped to “Best of My Love,” which was totally un-metal of him. A long drag from his cigarette followed. It had been months since he had smoked. Oddly enough, the song soothed him even though it reminded him of Susana, his ex-girlfriend from high school. Ever since they graduated, he had occasionally daydreamed of playing and dedicating that song to her (which was totally un-metal of him).

After he flicked the cigarette out the window, Elvis flung the car door open. He strode across the parking lot. On his way to the entrance, he noticed a few faces that looked familiar. He couldn’t remember their names, but he knew they were smart kids back in school. Would they recognize him now? Would anyone recognize him?

Standing by the entrance, next to the part of the restaurant that resembled a kitschy lighthouse, was Joey Marchment. He was smoking a cigarette by himself. Back in high school he was a quintessential stoner-skateboarder. He had gone to a couple of Elvis’s shows. Shit, they even shared a joint at one of their high school parties. Joey had also cleaned himself up for the occasion. Dress shirt, pair of khakis, shiny dress shoes instead of his old Dr. Martens. His bleach-blonde hair—which used to be long and greasy as if he flipped burgers for a living—was now short, thinning, and slicked back. Like Elvis, he had developed a respectable beer paunch.

“Elvis Borboa?” Joey said.

“What’s going on, Joey,” Elvis said, shaking his hand. “Glad you remember me.”

“Of course, man. You were Elvis, the heavy metal god!”

Elvis used to be the front man of a thrash metal band he started at San Leandro High with his best friend, Dontae. The band’s name was Slopsucker. In high school Elvis sported long, curly black hair, torn-up jeans, and a black leather jacket his dad had handed down to him.

“You still play?” Joey asked.

“Nah, man.” Elvis couldn’t help but hang his head.

“That’s too bad. I remember you used to shred.”

“Yeah, well, you know, it’s one of those things. Hardly anyone can pay the bills playing a six-string.”

“Fucking A, man, fucking A,” Joey said, nodding and slowly turning his head like he was watching a thought gently bob away.
Inside, Elvis heard a loud hum of chatter around the corner. Goddamn it, he thought. People were already asking about his former musical self.

A sign by the front podium read, “Class of ’87 Reunion!” An overly smiley Asian woman with a name tag that read “Annie Chow” sat behind a long table covered with rows of printed name tags. They exchanged pleasantries. Elvis remembered she was a major kiss-up in school. She parked her rear front row and center in their physics class so she could laugh at all the inane jokes from their teacher along with all the other voracious grade-grubbers. On top of being pretty, she had always been smart and driven. Once he saw the big glittery rock on her ring finger, Elvis figured she got just about everything she ever wanted in life.

He saw his name tag on the table. He scanned the remaining ones for Susana and Dontae’s. They were MIA. Were they coming? Were they already there? Would they talk to him, or tell him to fuck off? Would Susana be there with someone? A boyfriend? Husband? What if she was inexplicably free after all these years?

The classy restaurant overlooked the San Leandro Marina. The dining area around the bar was roped off for their reunion. All the tables had been cleared out so everyone could mingle. Seventy or eighty people convened throughout the room. Most of his old classmates had dressed up as if they were dining at a posh restaurant in San Francisco, the city he had called home since graduating from high school. Booming laughter from the patio startled him. There was so much happening around him. Before he realized what he was doing, Elvis beelined to the bar. He could’ve walked past Gandhi, Cindy Crawford, or Ozzy Osbourne and not noticed them. Man, did he need a drink.

As he leaned against the counter, staring at the bartender, trying to will him to look his way, Elvis scanned the bar as though his birth name was Cool Breeze. He locked eyes with a classmate whose name tag read “Mindy Roberts.” Her jaw dropped. She waved with such glee that he waved back, although he had never—as far as he remembered—had a conversation with her. Two stools down from Mindy was George, a wild-haired Samoan who had streaked across the football field during a homecoming game Susana had dragged him to. And then there she was: Susana. The woman of his sad and sorrowed dreams of unrequited love. She stood in a circle of women gathered at the other end of the bar. His heart bottomed. She was fucking gorgeous and cute as ever—the same big brown eyes, light-brown skin, and magnetic smile that drew people to her. Her black hair fell over the straps of her blue summer dress. Elvis thought she had never looked so beautiful—except maybe at the junior prom they had gone to together.

Once he spotted her, Elvis was done for; he couldn’t keep himself from stealing glances at her. After all those years they were actually in the same room. And to his complete and dizzying surprise she seemed to be alone. No possible significant other satellited around her.

While he watched her, Elvis couldn’t help but remember—as much as he didn’t want to—the last time they were together.


It all went down on a Saturday afternoon, less than two months before their senior prom. Elvis was in his bedroom restringing his black Jackson King V guitar. Venom’s classic Black Metal blared from his stereo. It was 1987, a year after thrash metal’s zenith when Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Slayer’s Reign of Blood, Megadeth’s Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?, and Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill came out. Elvis’s dad was in the backyard, working in his shed, when his mom knocked on the door.

“Yeah,” Elvis shouted over the music.

“Susy’s here for you!” she yelled from behind the door where Elvis had taped a poster of Machu Picchu shrouded in mist. “Shit,” he said to himself. He took a deep breath as he lurched to the front door.

Susy stood on the other side of the screen door. She wore a black tank top, faded blue jeans, and the green Chuck Taylors he had doodled on with a permanent marker. (He had scribbled “Elvis lives!” on the back heel.) She was concealing something behind her back.

“Hey, you wanna come in?” Elvis said, creaking the screen door open.

“That’s okay,” Susy said. “My dad’s taking us out to lunch with one of his friends. I was running some errands and just wanted to pop in to give you a surprise.”

“Oh yeah, what you got?”

Though he was trying to play it cool, Elvis could feel his stomach knot. The night before, he had snuck out to hit up a party without Susana. Celeste White, the lead cheerleader at San Leandro High, had invited him. Celeste White, the hottest girl in school, had flirted with him. She professed to Elvis that she liked him. This was certifiable wet dream material. To boot, she kept putting her hand on his arm and brushing her blonde hair while they talked. After he stumbled back home in a fog of blissful drunken stupor, he woke up thinking about how good it would have felt to make out with her. To have his hands all over her. The only reason he kept his paws to himself was because he and Susy had been together for two years.
Susy handed him a mixed tape. On the cassette case spine she wrote “Heavy Shit” and drew a smiley face. Years later, remembering those details slayed him.

“I really liked your last mix,” she said. “I think you’re right—the Scorpions are the best thing to ever come out of Germany.”
Elvis combed his long hair to the side so it wouldn’t cover half of his face. He stared off at the front lawn. Earlier that morning he had convinced himself to break up with her. He just didn’t know when to pull the plug.

“You okay?” she asked. Elvis had not hugged and kissed her like he typically would when she’d come over.

“Yeah, I’m just tired. Wait—let me walk you to your car.”

Susy marched to her old gray car parked in front of his parents’ house. He followed. She walked with her head lowered, staring at the walkway like she knew something was up. Afterward, Elvis wondered if she could sense what was coming.

“Your mind seems to be somewhere else,” Susy said as they approached her car.

Elvis took a breath. “Susy, this is something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’m just, uh—I, umm—I think we should date other people.”

Elvis never forgot the face Susy made—her mouth dropping, her eyes opening wide.

“Are you serious?” she said, staring up at him. She took a step forward. “You’ve been thinking about this for some time? Since when?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

“So why are you saying this to me now? You wanna go out with someone else? Is that it?”

Elvis took a step back. He thought she might try to slap him.

“Who is it, Elvis? Who is it?”

“It’s no one, Susy! I’m just afraid of this getting too serious. I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to say it.”
“So what are you really saying? Are you breaking up with me? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No, Susy. I just—think it’d be a good idea if we saw other people.”

Susy crossed her arms. She glared at him until he looked away. “That’s bullshit. And I am not okay with us seeing other people. If all you want to do is break up with me, then grow some damn balls and do it.”

Susy brushed past Elvis and stormed to the driver’s-side door. Once she fumbled for her keys, she stomped back to him.

“Give it to me,” she said.

She snatched the tape from Elvis, threw it on the sidewalk, and smashed the case with her foot. She flung the door open and slammed it before she drove off with the motor roaring.

Broken cassette in hand with its tape dangling, Elvis walked back into his house. He bunched up the loose tape in his hand. He didn’t want his mom to see it and ask what had happened.

In his room, the door closed, Elvis flipped through his milk crate full of albums. He took out Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. The album cover had an electric chair floating in a dark sky with bolts of lightning. He cued the record to “Fade to Black.” He blasted it, all dramatic, then he lay on his bed, hands cupped behind his head, clutching the cassette as the opening guitar notes filled the room. He stared at the picture of his idol, Tom Araya—the Chilean bassist and lead singer for Slayer—taped on the ceiling above his bed. He felt shitty about what he’d done. They had been friends since junior high when he and Susy took Spanish classes together (the equivalent of Rob Halford taking beginner’s classes for heavy metal screeching). During sophomore year he walked her home practically every day unless she was working on the school paper, having soccer practice, or attending one of her Chicano-power MECHA meetings. Susy had lost her virginity to him. That was a big deal to him as well. And she was the first girl—and maybe the only one—he had ever loved.

By then Elvis was getting caught up in all his self-hype about their band, especially after Slopsucker blew away the other musical acts at their school talent show. He truly believed that part of his life was merely the beginning of something bigger. His bandmates, Dontae and White Trash Phil, talked about becoming the best thing to come out of shit town San Leandro, like how Metallica’s Cliff Burton had come out of neighboring Castro Valley to become the most badass metal bassist on the planet. Elvis didn’t want to be like everyone else. He didn’t want to turn out like his mom and dad, who never seemed happy—more like they were stuck with one another. He wanted a rock ’n’ roll kind of life: the thrill he’d get when he would thrash his head and flail on a guitar. The way he felt ten feet tall onstage in front of a crowd. The communion he felt playing with his bandmates. “It’s one life you live,” his father—a former bohemian—liked to tell him. Una vida. Susy was a way cool chick, but Celeste White—the girl every straight guy in the locker room openly fantasized about—was the Big Leagues. Susy didn’t fit in with the flashy, VH1 behind-the-scenes documentary Elvis thought his life could become. He was afraid that he and Susy would turn out like his mom and pop someday. He was afraid of growing up to become like his dad, living his dreams vicariously through one of his children since he was too chickenshit to have truly chased them when he was younger.

After “Fade to Black” ended, the turntable needle hissed on a constant loop. Elvis leapt off his bed. Fuck it, he thought, chucking the tape into his trash can. In that moment he practically thought of their breakup as some life lesson; he rightly figured life would have its share of difficult decisions he would have to make. Like dumping a sweet girl for the hottest chick in school.

Ten years later, Elvis regretted their breakup more than anything in his life.
....
From Ballad of a Slopsucker: Stories by Juan Alvarado Valdivia. Copyright © 2019 University of New Mexico Press. Look for it in 2019 at UNM Press site here.
​

Juan Alvarado Valdivia is a Peruvian American writer born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in Fremont, CA. His fiction has been published in The Acentos Review, Black Heart Magazine, The Cortland Review, Label Me Latina/o, Origins Journal, and is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner. His first book, ¡Cancerlandia!: A Memoir, received an Honorable Mention for the 2016 International Latino Book Award for Best Biography in English.

​

​By Martin Hill Ortiz

The giant green lady stood unbalanced, tipping backwards on the heels of her sandals. A dusting of snow covered her toes. Jake Morrison stared upwards, taking in her imposing figure. Although impossible, he thought that her inflexible neck had bent. Her lifeless pupils seemed to have rolled up to scan the heavens. From Morrison's view, the sharp rays of her crown, so far above him, appeared as parallel lines, each pair stretched out to where they met at the vanishing point.

Once the government proclaimed the Statue of Liberty a holy relic, they contracted the firm of Morrison, Kopovitz, and Shoemaker to install a four-hundred-foot tall cross to complement the sculpture and to affirm Lady Liberty's place as part of the One Nation Undergod's Daeo-Christian heritage. As a further design improvement, the statue's tablet was changed to the Ten Commandments which she now held at arm's length for all the world to witness.

The new structure, a massive thick-beamed cross, towered over and behind Liberty, dominating her; its bone-white bricks gleamed. But...

... but perhaps I shouldn't have used so much dynamite to excavate the foundation for the cross, Morrison thought. As a result of the blasting, the backside of Liberty's pedestal had sunk three feet below the center. The front, in turn, had risen three feet, enough to cause a fifteen-foot displacement at the height of the torch.

“She's going to fall,” Kopovitz said.

“Just a little bent,” Morrison replied. “Besides, look on the bright side: no one remembers the architect of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

“Bonanno Pisano,” Kopovitz whispered.

Shoemaker peered down on his partners from an observation window on top of her head, a flea on her scalp.

Kopovitz thought of his grandparents, all four of them arriving at different times at Ellis Island, just a stone's skip away. Lithuanian, Irish, Italian, and Armenian, all finding this nation and making a home, all passing this giant's torch, all finding each other, first as husbands and wives, then ultimately sharing the same descendants.

I can save Liberty, Morrison told himself. That chain at her ankles, symbolically broken, could be mended to serve as an anchor. Spikes could be driven through her feet to secure her to her base. The arm holding the Bible could be lashed to the horizontal beam of the cross for support and the wrist of the arm raising the torch could be nailed to the vertical column.

Strange, he thought, from this perspective her crown seemed to be made of thorns.

​Martin Hill Ortiz, a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a professor of Pharmacology at the Ponce Health Sciences University in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Martin has authored numerous short stories that have appeared in print and online journals, four mystery thrillers, and his 60-page poem, Two Mistakes, won the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid poetry award. He assembled and wrote the introduction to a three-volume anthology of the best short stories in English available through Rook's Page Publishing. He has also worked in theater, having run a comedy troupe in South Florida.

​By Alberto Ramirez

The broadcasting xylophone chimes of KHJ-FM sounded over the Philco, table-top radio in the Leyva family parlor and brought Señora Leyva from the kitchen with soup ladle in hand. She fiddled with the radio station dial, tuned out the static, and turned up the volume. The announcer, in a booming, chipper, sing-song cadence, welcomed his listeners.  
“Greetings, Angelenos! Soon, The Adventures of Arnie Guff, Master of Disguises, but first the news—brought to you by Spielman’s Appliances, proudly serving Los Angeles since 1902, located on the corner of State and First Street, in the heart of Boyle Heights. Sailors and young zoot suiters clashed again last night, this time outside of the Aragon Ballroom in Venice Beach. Ten Mexican youths, all armed with crude weapons, were routed and stripped of their garish suits by Uncle Sam’s fighting men, then promptly arrested by police and hauled off to the Los Angeles Hall of Justice. These latest arrests come after service men declared war on zoot-suit gangs who have been preying on innocent citizens on the East Side of the city. According to authorities the street battles represent an increasingly serious State-wide juvenile delinquency problem. The L.A. City Council has proposed a resolution that would ban the wearing of zoot suits in public. In other news . . .”
“¿Oíste Turi?” said Señora Leyva. “Dijo el señor que es peligroso salir esta noche.”
Arturo “Turi” Leyva—tall, dark and dimpled faced—stood proudly in front of the parlor mirror, combing a gob of Pomade into his thick, black, handsome head of curly hair.
“It’s fine amá,” he said. “No te preocupes. I’m just taking Rosie up to the Orpheum to catch a show. We won’t be out too late.”
“¡Ay Turi! Tú aquí y tu hermano Martín en la guerra. ¡Ya no puedo!”
“The war is the war, amá ,” he said. “I’m sure Martín’s ok. He said so in his last letter home.”
Turi brushed lint from the broad shoulders of his brand new, pin-striped drape jacket, ran a hand the length of his pleated, balloon-legged trousers and wolf whistled long and low. 
“¡Firme!” he said.
Señora Leyva—diminutive, yet physically overbearing in her matriarchal serge smock—pushed up on Turi’s heels and whispered omens in his ear.     
“Dijo el señor que tu traje es ilegal.”
Turi ran the plastic comb from the crown of his feathery, jet black pompadour to the tip of his perfectly tapered duck-tail.   
“I worked hard for the money to buy this suit,” he said. “I look good in it. That ain’t illegal.”
He always wanted a suit like this, ever since he saw Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor himself, wearing a fancy long coat in Life Magazine, shaking Adolf Hitler’s hand a few years before the War began. Never mind the war-time rationing of fabric and the accusations of being Un-American. Was he to blame for the German invasion of Poland? Was it his fault that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor? Did the Allied victory really hang in the balance of a few extra yards of worsted wool? He deserved a suit like that and so he worked overtime at the Pan-Pacific Fisheries, the tuna cannery on Terminal Island, for piece-work pay, saved his money for six months and paid Tiburcio the Tailor of East L.A. $20 cash for a first-rate, bespoke Zoot Suit. And what a suit it was! It made him feel like a real American. 
“Cámbiate, mijo,” his mother pleaded.
“I’m not changing, amá,” he said, defiantly. “This is me.”
Señora Leyva circled around and stood in front of Turi, blocked the mirror to get his undivided attention, and looked him square in the eyes.
“Bueno,” she said lovingly, “tú sabrás. Te vez muy guapo. Pero por el amor de Dios ten cuidado mijo.”
“I’ll be careful,” he promised.
She saw him off on the porch, made the sign of the cross over him—as if she were sending a second son off to war—kissed him on the cheek, and watched over him as he strolled up Orme Avenue into the night.
Back inside, in the family parlor, Señora Leyva tuned the radio to her favorite program—Everything for the Boys—to hear the latest news about the War and the American servicemen stationed overseas.
Weeping softly into a plush red scarf, she lit a rose-scented, Virgen de Guadalupe votive candle for her two sons, for the one here on the home front in Boyle Heights and for the other across the Atlantic Ocean, on the front lines in Germany. She prayed the rosary:
“Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre...”
Turi caught a Yellow Car—the P-Line going downtown—on the corner of Whittier Boulevard. The conductor welcomed him aboard, tipped his cap, rang the bell and put the streetcar into motion. It lurched forward, gliding along smoothly on steel wheels, the cool, jasmine fragranced night air blowing in through the open windows. The coach was empty, the long, cylindrical tube with its silver and green interior shining by a row of flying saucer lights. Turi made his way to the back and slumped down in a seat by the rear exit door.
He sat there thinking of nothing in particular and everything all at once, as one does while sitting alone in the back of a streetcar: the people all abuzz on the boulevard going out on this warm, springtime night, to the jazz clubs and the Mexican restaurants, to the cafés and the cinema to see Casablanca, A Guy Named Joe and Destination Tokyo. His best girl Rosie. A bonafide bombshell, as fine as any pin-up girl. Plump, ruby lips, high cheekbones, button-nose, sparkling brown eyes and perfectly done-up platinum blond Victory Rolls. What a doll! His big brother Marty the fighting GI. And the War. When would it be over? When would the god damn Axis call it quits? When would they let Martín take the big boat home?
The Yellow Car came to a screeching halt on South Boyle Avenue to let on a passenger, a skinny Mexican-American kid who dropped the fare into the slot and came sidling coolly down the aisle. 
“¿Qué te pasa, calabaza?” said the kid, making his way to the rear.
“¡Nada nada, pinche Chavala!” said Turi.
Baby-faced Jimmy Lara, a kid two years Turi’s junior at Roosevelt High School, strolled into the light, combing his princely, Teddy boy hair.   
“¿Y tu mamá ?” said Jimmy. “She actually let you out of the house? ¿Y eso? Ain’t it passed your bedtime mija?”
Turi socked him playfully on the arm.
“Don't flinch, don't foul, hit the line hard!”
“Ok,” said Jimmy, plopping down on a seat. “Ya, Rough Rider!”
“Pues no mames güey!”
Jimmy looked Turi up and down, admiring his brand new suit.
“Nice drapes carnal,” he said. “Where’ya steal ’em?”
“Bucho’s in East Los.”
“I’m gonna buy me a traje like that someday.”
“Pues stop flubbing the dub and get a job, Jimbo.”
Jimmy gawped wistfully at the zoot suit, at the beautiful stitch work, the perfectly tapered trousers, hemmed just so, and the fine, double-breasted jacket that looked like it belonged to a well-to-do Anglo-American, to someone famous, a movie star, Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart. 
Looking down at his own plain white, button-down shirt and his old, brown corduroy pants, he turned abruptly and spat out the trolley window.
“Entonces que, Jimbo,” said Turi. “¿Qué onda?”
“Oh what? You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
Jimmy made a sound like a car getting a flat tire.
“Pues Uncle Sammy’s Sailors, that’s what. Están bien encabronados. They’re turning up like pinche fire ants from the Naval Reserve Armory over in Chavez Ravine, cruising into the barrio, looking for a fight. It’s war.”
“I heard it on the radio.” 
“¿Si ya sabes, pa qué te digo? Anyways, I’m going downtown, see if I can’t get into a bronca, have myself some fun. ¿Y tu?” 
“I’m meeting Rosie at the Orpheum. Going to see a show.”
The streetcar conductor glanced in the rear-view mirror.
“You boys really shouldn’t be out tonight,” he said. “It’s going to get hot out there. Those sailors ain’t messing around. I saw them beat a Mexican kid on Central Avenue last night. Poor kid was busted up pretty bad.”
“¡Chale!” said Jimmy. “Those pinche gringos ain’t even from around here. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles is my town!”
“Damn right,” said Turi.
“¡No, hombre! Next thing you know they’ll be locking us up in el bote, too, like they did my neighbor Kenji y su pobre familia.”
“¿A poco?” said Turi, agasp. 
“Yup. Took him right out of 2nd period math class, then went down to his house on Soto Street to round up the other Okamuras.”
“¿Así nomás?”
“Así nomás. No crimes committed, no trials, no convictions, no nada. Straight to Owens Valley.”
Jimmy whistled chirpily and made a fluttery gesture to show how quickly they’d been taken and that they likely wouldn’t be coming home. 
“¿Oye, y el Johnny Schmitz?”
“¡No, hombre! ¡Ese pinche, blue-eyed güero! ¿Que tú crees? They left him sitting muy tranquillo at his desk in Mr. White’s 4th period mechanical engineering class. Hasta le dieron milk y cookies al güey.”
“¡Chinga su madre!”
“Y sus antepasados también.”
They sat quietly, thoughtfully looking out at the city lights as the Yellow Car chugged across the Los Angeles River over the Sixth Street Bridge. It was a lovely city, especially at night, despite the news of the day.
As they passed the steel arch mid-section of the bridge Turi pointed out the window, gawking slack-jawed as if he’d seen La Llorona on the riverbank.
“Look!” he said.
Jimmy turned in time to see—painted on a broad steel girder in big, white letters—a declaration of independence.
 Joaquín Murrieta is Free!
Neither had a clue as to what it meant, but both felt their spirts suddenly lifted. An inexplicable rush of joy like captive eagles sprung from cages. Pachucos with wings soaring over the sacred City of Los Angeles, high above the madness and the mortal fray and thoughts of incarcerated neighbors.
“Next stop South Broadway!” called the conductor, ringing the bell.
The Yellow Car coasted to a gradual stop and Turi and Jimmy came down reluctantly from that other place beyond the clouds, the stars and the dream of freedom.
“Is this your stop?” asked Turi.
“Nah,” said Jimmy. “I’m getting off at the Orpheum.”
“Pues órale.”
The streetcar turned south and proceeded along Broadway for three city blocks until the Orpheum Theater appeared along the streetscape through the row of trolley windows—a red and green neon beacon in the night. A Beaux Arts palace shining by a row of swiveling Hollywood searchlights. The marquee was all aglow, the black letters boasting the act for the evening.

​“You boys be careful out there,” said the conductor.
“Órale Steve-O!” said Jimmy, giving him a friendly pat on the back.
They got off the Yellow Car and stood curbside, watching the streetcar glide smoothly into the heart of the Broadway Theater District, clanging its bell, kicking up a crumpled, day-old newspaper into the air.
There was a long line in front of the Orpheum Theater that trailed off around the block, mostly white kids from the suburbs and a few servicemen. Turi spotted Rosie right away. She was standing at the front of the line by the theater entrance, wearing the dress he’d bought for her with his overtime earnings—a mustard yellow Grable tea dress—and a matching pillbox hat.
Sticking his fingers into his mouth he whistled to Rosie. A love bird’s call. Her face lit up at the sight of her man. She waved, blew fat kisses.
“Güacha,” said Jimmy, pointing out a couple of sailors in line.
“Me vale madre,” said Turi, going to Rosie. “You coming or what?”
“Nah,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to Dino’s for a coke.”
But he stayed put, jittery despite his youthful show of bravado on the streetcar. He was watching Turi strut bravely towards Rosie and the sailors.
Turi moved in time to the rhythm of the Boogie Woogie Blues. It’d been playing on a loop in his head since he caught the Yellow Car in Boyle Heights.
“What’s cooking baby doll?” he said.
“Just waiting on my fella,” said Rosie. “Have ya’ seen ’em?”
“Don’t know? What’s he look like?”
“He’s a big cheese. A real dreamboat. Looks a little like you, but taller.”
“Nope, haven’t seen ‘em. Oh wait—”
They laughed. Rosie fell affectionately into his arms and Turi peppered her cheek with kisses. And the sailors in line—a couple of oafish Iowa farmers’ sons in dress blues—suddenly took notice.
“Get a load of this clown in those god damn duds,” said the first seaman. “Looks like Barnum & Bailey is back in town.”
“Say, did that greaser just cut the line?” said the second seaman.
“God damn right he did, Henry boy!”
“Don’t blow a fuse,” said Rosie, holding on tight to Turi.  
“Sure thing baby doll,” he said. “It’s just a couple of sauced up squidies, is all. It don’t bother me none.”
“And look at the scrag he’s got with ’em,” said the first seaman. “She looks like a Ti-ju-ana moll.”
“Get lost!” said Turi, spinning around. 
“Get lost, he says,” said the second seaman. “Well, doesn’t that beat all? This uppity Mexican’s telling us to shove off! Let’s teach this spic a lesson.”
“Now you’re talking, Henry boy!”
The people in line between Turi and the sailors looked up, startled and panic-stricken in a moment of immobility. Nobody moved or said anything. A Yellow Car approached, clanging its bell, and someone on the passing streetcar shouted:
“Kill that good-for-nothing zoot suiter!”
“No!” screamed Rosie. “Run, Turi!”
The sailors got a hold of Turi before he could put up a fight. A crowd quickly formed to watch the spectacle. The first seaman pinned Turi’s arms behind his back, while the second seaman punched him repeatedly in his handsome, dimpled-face. Blood poured out of his busted nose and mouth onto the sidewalk, the sight of which only stirred the sailors’ fervor. The frenzied, white crowd chanted and whooped, pushing Rosie backwards, drowning out her cries for help.
“That ought to shut ’em up,” said the first seaman, letting go of Turi.
He collapsed onto the sidewalk, lay dazed and twisted where he fell.
“Had enough? Huh?” said the second seaman.
“Let ‘em have it!” someone shouted, spurring the sailors on.
“You heard ’em, Henry boy,” said the first seaman.
They started back in on Turi, stomping and kicking him in the gut, in the ribs and squarely in the head until he coughed up blood and spit out teeth. It went on like this for a while, until the sailors grew tired and stopped to catch their breath.
In between the beatings Turi lay gazing dumbly up at the sky, looking passed the hateful, grim-faced sailors and the angry mob staring down at him with rage and curiosity and the dizzying, fire-bright, Hollywood searchlights crisscrossing the nighttime sky. Close by, Turi could hear the faintest murmur of Rosie’s soft weeping, gradually being washed over by a seething tide of savage laughter, sweet Swing-time music and the high, cold wailing of police sirens as squad cars quickly approached the scene of the commotion.
“Don’t cry, Rosie,” Turi mumbled. “Go on home. I’ll be ok.”
The crowd was riled up now and wanted to see more blood.
“Hey, that one’s with him!” shouted a young white woman. She was pointing at a bystander—young Jimmy Lara standing curbside. 
“I saw him get off the Yellow Car with this one here,” she said.
Seeing the mob turning on him, Jimmy held up his hands in submission and backed up.
“Wait a second,” he said. “I’ve never seen that guy before in my life.”
“He’s lying!” said the young white woman. “They’re pals.”
“Please, no,” he insisted. “He’s the zoot suiter, not me.”
Jimmy turned and ran up Broadway, disappeared down an alley.
“Let’s pluck this chicken,” said the second seaman, looking down at Turi writhing on the sidewalk.
The sailors yanked Turi up forcibly by the lapels of his jacket and, with the help of a couple of all-too-willing bystanders, began to strip him naked. First they tore the fine, pin-striped, double-breasted drape jacket right off his back and flung it into the jeering crowd who proceeded to rip it into rags. His white Oxford dress shirt was tattered and blood-sopped and came undone with a few light tugs. They unbuckled his belt, pulled down his trousers and tossed them into the street, leaving him broken in his bare skivvies on the concrete. Winded and victorious, the sailors hooted and shook self-clasping handshakes above their Dixie cup hats. The crowd cheered wildly. It was the last thing that Turi heard before blacking out from the beating and the shame of it all.
When Turi Leyva came to he was lying on a cold, metal bunk in a two-man jail cell, cloaked in an itchy, wool blanket—property of the Lincoln Heights Jail. His cell-mate—an old, barefooted, Mexican man in a filthy, second-hand serge suit and a ratty, felt hat—was breathing down on him. A heavy, tequila haze burned in Turi’s nostrils. He stirred, went to vomit and spat up blood.
“¡El Muerto vive!” said the old man. “¡Que milagro!”
“Where am I?” asked Turi.
“Aquí con Papá Chencho en el pinche bote. ¡Oye, te rompieron la madre!”
Turi touched his cut and swollen face and winced.
“Los marineros,” he said.
“¿Oye, y por qué andas en calzón? ¿Te violaron o qué?
The very question was emasculating. He ignored it, stared silently at the rusty bars of the cell-door, listening for the sound of the jailer. 
“Leyva!”
The voice echoed in the rafters of the cavernous cell block. A big, gruff cop appeared at the cell-door. 
“Ar-tu-ro...Arthur Leyva,” said the cop. “Bail’s been set at $20. If you can’t make bail, make yourself at home. Judge’ll see you Monday morning.”
“But, what’s the charge?”
“Disturbing the peace.”
“I disturbed the peace?” said Turi, staring dumbly at the cop.
“Yes. There were witnesses.”
He said it with such authority that Turi was nearly convinced that he was guilty of the crime. The cop turned and walked back. Papá Chencho sucked at his teeth and spat in the corner.
“Maldito carcelero,” he said.
Turi rolled onto his side. He thought of his poor, doting mother at home, probably pacing the family parlor floorboards thin with worry. And his girl Rosie, how she must be suffering, not knowing if he was alright. Jimmy was probably sound asleep and dreaming in his bed right about now. Turi didn’t blame the kid for running. He might have done the same thing if it was him. It sure would be nice to go home.
“Joaquín Murrieta is free,” he said, remembering the words painted on the steel girder on the Sixth Street Bridge.
“What do you know about Joaquín Murrieta?” said Papá Chencho, out of nowhere, in broken English.
Turi sat up, looked up at Papá Chencho and listened.
“They do not teach you about him in those American history books at that pinche school of yours, do they? No, they do not. He was a peaceful, hardworking, God loving Californio who was wronged by the Anglos.”
“What did they do to him?”
“They accused him of stealing a horse, beat him, stole his land, his possessions, and raped and murdered his fine young wife.”
“And what did he do?”
“He swore revenge, became the famous Robin Hood of the West.”
“And then?”
“The state of California put a bounty on his head, $5000 dead or alive.”
“But he outsmarted them, didn’t he?”
“Yes, for a time. But they finally caught up with him.”
“But he got away, right?”
“No, the Anglos set him free.”
“¿A poco?”
“Yes, they cut off his head, put it in a big jar of whiskey and charged people two bits to see it.”
“But you said they let him go—”
Papá Chencho took off his felt hat, examined it at arm’s length, licked his thumb and rubbed the grimy brim.
“Joaquín Murrieta está libre,” he said. “Libre de este mundo. Libre de la Ley y de la pinche injusticia. Por fin—”

​Alberto Ramirez, a Los Angeles based writer and UCLA graduate, had short stories published in Westwind Journal of the Arts, Angel City Review, Drabblez Magazine, LossLit Magazine UK and Adelaide Literary Magazine (forthcoming). His novel, Everything That Could Not Happen Will Happen Now (Floricanto and Berkeley Presses 2016), was selected by Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club summer reading list 2017. This short story is set in Los Angeles circa June 1943 during the “Zoot Suit Riots,” so called even though U.S. military men attacked young Mexican Americans wearing the suit style shown above. 

By Rodolfo Alvarado

From my place in line, I could see my brothers and sisters acting silly in the back of our station wagon, La Blanca. I could also see my amá. She was sitting in the front seat staring straight ahead. She was probably praying. She always prayed until she knew, for sure, we had the job that would get us through the rest of the year.
Seeing me looking at her, she waved and smiled. I didn’t act silly anymore, but to make her feel better, I hid behind my apá and then peeked at her before hiding again. As I kept hiding and peeking, her smile got bigger and bigger.
We were playing Peek-a-Boo. I’d played the game with her ever since I was a baby, and to make her happy, since the first year I’d waited in line. I was eight then, thirteen now, about to be fourteen.
I guess we were having fun, but before she could take her turn, my apá asked me to go and get the letter from the American Government showing he had permission to work in El Norte. He’d forgotten it in the glovebox.
Running up to my amá, I explained what had happened. She found the letter right away and as she handed it to me, she said, “Standing in line, Junior, you look like a big boy.”
Hearing her, my brothers and sisters made funny faces at me behind her back. It didn’t bother me because they still acted like babies, and I was becoming a man, like my apá.
Walking back, I think some of the campesinos thought I was cutting in line because they started looking at me kind of funny. To remind some, and to show others, that I’d already been in line, when I got closer, I waved the letter, yelling, “¡Apá, apá, encontré la carta!” Some stopped staring, but others kept looking at me until they saw me hand the letter to my apá, and then take my place in line behind him.
It took close to thirty minutes for me and my apá to reach the front of the line, and when we did, my apá gave the letter to the foreman. The foreman looked it over, asking, “You, Emilio Rodriguez, Sr.?”
Knowing the foreman was always in a hurry, my apá answered his questions as fast as he could.
“Yes,” my apá answered.
“From Piedras Negras, Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Speak-ah la English?”
“Yes.”
“How many to work?”
“Seven.”
“That includes you and your wife, right?”
“Yes, and our children.”
“How old are they?”
“Junior’s thirteen, Lala’s twelve, Juan Daniel’s….”
“I don’t need their names, damn it, just their ages. How old are they?”
“Thirteen, twelve, eleven, nine and eight.”
“The eight-year-old? Is that a boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“This her first time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think she’s ready? We got us a big crop this year. We’re gonna need everybody workin’ every minute of every hour of every day. We don’t need her slowing you or your wife down, ¿comprende?”
“No, señor, she will do a good job; all of them will do a good job. Four of them were here last year.”
Leaning forward on his desk, and his eyes getting mean, the foreman said, “She better, or you’ll find yourselves out of a job quicker than you can say Speedy Gonzales.”
​

​“Sí, cómo no.”
The foreman wrote my apá’s name in the red book with the blue lines. Next to his name, in the place for men, he wrote a one. In the place for women, he wrote a one, and in the place for children, he wrote a five, then he told my apá how much we were getting paid.
Since I’d waited in line, the most my apá had ever made was a dollar fifty an hour, my amá one dollar and me and my brothers and sister, fifty cents. So, when the foreman told my apá he’d be making three dollars an hour, my amá two dollars, me and my older brother and sister a dollar, and the two youngest fifty cents, my apá turned and looked at me. I could tell he was wondering if I had heard the same thing.
I had.
I was thinking the foreman had gone loco, and I knew my apá was thinking the same thing, too.
The foreman wrote how much we were getting paid on a yellow card that looked the same as the one he gave us every year, then he asked if we wanted to rent a camp house.
“Yes,” my apá answered.
The farmers we worked for rented us campesinos, these little houses, what we called, casitas, and they called camp houses. The cost to rent a casita changed from year to year. If you were paid a lot, a casita cost a lot, and if you were paid a little, a casita still cost a lot, but not as much as if you were making a lot of money. If you wanted, you could rent a place in town, but it cost more than a casita, and you had to drive to work every morning, so most campesinos rented a casita. Most of the time casitas were rented to families, but on my first trip I saw at least fifteen men staying in one casita. When I asked my apá why, he said that, “Sometimes, a man had to do, what a man had to do.”
“It’ll cost you thirty-five dollars a week,” the foreman said. “You still want it?”
“Yes,” my apá answered. “Please.”
We worked close to ten hours a day, so I knew there’d be no problem paying the rent.
The foreman wrote the number C-11 on the yellow card. The letter C stood for the camp and the number 11 for the casita we’d be renting. There were eight camps in all and each camp had fifteen casitas. So far, I’d stayed in H-2, E-4, B-7, and in C-8, two times.
The foreman handed my apá the yellow card, saying, “We'll expect you all ready by six tomorrow morning and since we have a bumper crop, we’ll be working seven days a week, ¿comprende?”
“Seven days?” my apá asked.
“Seven days,” the foreman said, “you gotta problem with that, there’s the door.”
“No, señor,” my apá said, “no problem.”
Finished with us, the foreman yelled, “Next!”
My apá thanked him and as we walked out of the office and past the other campesinos in line my apá’s walk was tall and proud, and mine, mine was almost the same.
When we reached La Blanca, my apá handed the yellow card to my amá. As she read it, her eyes got big. “Is this for real, Emilio, three dollars?”
Shaking his head up and down, my apá said, “And you, you and the children, did you see how much you make?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. I did.”
My amá smiled really big, held the card against her heart and closed her eyes. She prayed and when she finished, crossed herself.
I knew my apá had more to say because he hadn’t started La Blanca. “We’ll be working seven days a week.”
“Seven days?” my amá asked.
“Seven days,” my apá echoed, quietly.
I didn’t know if my apá or amá had ever worked seven days a week, but I knew me and my brothers and sisters never had. Working six days a week was hard, and I knew seven was going to be harder, especially for my little sister.
“What about church,” my amá asked, “and going to the store? What are we going to do?”
Starting La Blanca, my apá said with a smile, “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way. We always do.”
My brothers and sisters didn’t hear what they were saying because they were too busy talking about whether or not we were stopping at Pete’s and then the park.
We didn’t go to Pete’s, and the park across the street from Pete’s, every year. We only went when our parents knew we’d make enough money to help us through the rest of the year. Since I’d made my first trip to El Norte, five years ago, I’d been to Pete’s, and then the park, two times, so when my apá said we were going to Pete’s and then to the park, my brothers and sisters went crazy, but nobody went crazier than my little sister, Esmeralda. She let out a grito.
I’d gone to Pete’s and the park my first year, too, so I understood why she was so happy. In the years before, she, like me and my brothers and sister, had stayed with our amá’s parents, Abuelito Louis and Abuelita Cruz, until we were old enough to work.
In the two times I’d been to Pete’s, we always got our own cheeseburger and Coke, but all of us, even my apá and amá, shared french fries, but this time, we all listened as apá ordered cheeseburgers, Cokes, and an order of french fries for each of us! Hearing this, my brothers and sisters really went crazy. My amá told them to behave, and most of the time they did, but this time they didn’t listen, not until amá said there’d be no going to the park unless they settled down.
No’mbre, they turned into little angels until we got to the park and they finished eating. After that, you couldn’t stop them. They were ready for some fun, and to be honest, I was too, because I knew that after today there’d be nothing but seven days a week of hard work.
My apá and amá always played with us right after we ate, but this time they told us to go ahead, that they’d join us after they were done talking. From the top of the slide, I could see them sitting on the blanket where we ate. I wondered what they were talking about and the words they used, and, as I wondered if I’d ever fall in love, get married and have children, they smiled at each other, and my apá put his hand on my amá’s cheek and kissed her.
Amá always gave him a quick kiss when they were outside or me and my brothers and sisters could see them, but this time, I think she forgot they were outside and we were around, because she kissed him for a long time.
When they finished kissing, they came and played with us. They rode and pushed us on the swings, went down the slide, and played freeze tag. They played Duck-Duck, Red-Rover, Red-Rover, and hide-and-seek. Everyone had such a good time that it was hard for me to tell who was having more fun, my apá and amá, or my brothers and sisters.
When the sun started going down and the mosquitoes got to be too much, we drove to El Gallo to pick up things like bologna, flour, eggs, milk, coffee, ice, and toilet paper. My apá and amá were the only ones who ever went into the store. Being the oldest, it was my job to take care of my brothers and sisters. I never liked babysitting them because I never knew if they were going to listen to me or not, but this time, I got lucky because my littlest brother and sister fell asleep and my brother, Juan Daniel, read a book, while my sister, Lala, worked on a word search puzzle.
By the time my apá and amá were done at El Gallo, and we got to Camp C, the other campesinos and their families were already having their dinner. Most ate burritos they made before leaving home. We were no different. It made the first night at the camp easy on everybody, especially mothers.
Inside, las casitas were the same. You walked into a big room. Part of it served as a living room and the other part a kitchen. The only door inside went to the restroom. We only had cold water and the floors were made of cement. The living room had a small table, two chairs, a coffee table, and a small bed. My sisters slept in the bed and the rest of us on the floor.
The kitchen had a small refrigerator, a small stove, and a sink. A cabinet hung above the sink. Inside there were different colored plates, glasses, and bowls made from metal and under the sink were some pots, pans and a box of forks and spoons—big and small—for eating and cooking. My amá never used any of those things, she brought her own.
The restroom had a toilet, a small shower and one hook to hang towels. Our amá made us take a shower every day after work. I didn’t mind because I was the oldest, which meant I got to go first, after my amá and apá.
There were only two windows: One beside the front door and a smaller one in the restroom. From the restroom window I could see the cotton fields and the clothes lines where we hung our wet towels and our amá the clothes she washed every Wednesday and Sunday.
I liked looking out the restroom window. I’d think about those who’d worked the fields before us, and then, I’d whisper a prayer for them, a prayer that all their dreams would come true.
After praying, I used my pocket knife to scratch a small cross under the window. To see it, someone would have to be looking for it. I thought of it as a gift, un regalo, for anyone special enough to find it.
The next morning, and every morning after that, we woke up at five. We ate a bowl of atole with a slice of butter on top, and while we got dressed, our amá made our lunch.
Walking outside she gave each of us a sack and a gallon of water. Inside each sack were two bologna sandwiches, a small bag of Fritos, an apple, and in each gallon of water, there were always a few pieces of ice.
We thanked our amá and as we waited for the truck to take us to work, our apá told us not to eat until the foreman gave us permission, and to drink our water slowly, or we’d get sick. Then, he’d tell us to make him and our amá proud. My brothers and sisters knew this meant the time for acting silly was over.
The mornings were cold, and when the sun came up, the day was hot. We wore gloves and bandages on our fingers, but they still bled. We filled burlap sacks with cotton, and when they were full emptied them into a trailer. You had to work fast and keep going, no matter what.
When I was eight, and I picked cotton for the first time, I cried and told my apá and amá I didn’t want to work, that it was too hard. They asked me to stop crying; to stop before the foreman heard me. They told me I was doing a good job and then took cotton from my sack and put it in theirs, and when they saw it wasn’t enough to make me stop crying, they told me to pray to la Virgen de Guadalupe for strength. I did, and when I finished praying, my apá said, “Aguántate, mijo, aguántate.”
I’d never heard the word aguántate before, so I asked my apá what the word meant. He told me that it could mean a lot of things, but to him and my amá, it meant to use what life gives you to make you stronger. Some men, women, and children, like me and my older brothers and sisters, understood what the word meant, but others did not. They were the ones, as our apá and amá taught us, who complained about the hot sun, the low pay, the foreman’s watchful eye, or ran away in the middle of the night before all the cotton was picked.
I did as my apá and amá taught me, and as I grew up, I never told anyone about being hot, thirsty, or hungry, but that was me. I wish it could’ve been that way for my little sister, Esmeralda, too, because on the first day of work, she started crying, and even after our parents talked to her, she couldn’t stop, and the harder she tried, the harder it became for her to work. Our apá and amá tried and tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t. When the foreman saw and heard how she was acting, he pulled his horse around. As he rode closer, my amá told me and my brothers and sister to keep working.
Riding up to my apá and Esmeralda, the foreman yelled, “What’s going on?!”
“No,” my apá said, as he got up and stood between Esmeralda and the foreman. “She’s okay. She’s okay.”
“She’s yours!?” the foreman yelled.
“Sí, señor,” my apá said.
 “Well, if she’s yours,” the foreman yelled, “you better get her back to work before I have to do it for you! You understand me, boy?”
“Sí, señor,” my apá said—said as he quickly turned around, and, in a voice I’d never heard coming out of his mouth, yelled, “Esmeralda get to work and stop crying, stop crying, now!”
My little sister had never heard him talk that way, too. It scared her—scared her so much that she stopped crying and went to work, right away.
“What’d I tell you, Paco,” the foreman yelled at my apá, “your kids keep you from working and you’ll find yourselves out of a job faster than you can say Speedy Gonzales!”
Thinking my apá needed help, I cried out in a voice—a voice just loud enough so the foreman wouldn’t think I was being disrespectful, “I’ll help her!”
“Junior!” my apá yelled.
Riding his horse right up to me, the foreman asked, “What did you say?”
“I said, I can help her.”
“Help her?” the foreman asked. “Help her what?”
“Work,” I said, as my apá called to me again, “Junior!”
“You think,” the foreman yelled, as he got off his horse, walked up and put his face right in front of mine, “that we’re paying you a dollar, a goddamn dollar an hour, to help someone else do their fuckin’ job?!”
I didn’t know... didn’t know what to say.
The foreman leaned his face closer to mine, yelling, “I asked you a question, boy!”
I looked at my apá, and he looked at me. There was a distance, a distance between us—a distance where a boy—a boy suddenly found himself becoming a man—a man who could no longer turn to his apá to correct a mistake he’d made on his way to growing up. But, there was also the look in a father’s eyes, a look that said, “No, no, my son, my little boy, I am not yet ready to let you carry the load of this world on your shoulders.”
 My apá pulled off the strap to his burlap sack and ran as fast as he could to me and the foreman. In the same voice he used with Esmeralda, he yelled, “Get to work, Junior, now!”
I did as he ordered, and then he started talking to the foreman in a voice loud enough for only the foreman to hear.
Seeing this, my amá told me and my brothers and sisters to work faster. She said it in a shaky voice I’d never heard coming out of her mouth. The sound of it scared me, and as I looked around at my brothers and sisters, I could tell it scared them, too. All of us started working as fast as we could, and when I peeked at my apá, I saw the foreman staring at him with a look in his eyes that I understood right away to mean that the work and the money that would see us through the rest of the year were in his hands. In his, and no one else's.
With a final word and a small bow, my apá ran back and got to work.
Behind me, I could feel the foreman staring down at us from the top of his horse. He wanted us to slow down; for Esmeralda to make a sound; for me to open my mouth; for my apá or amá to check on how we were doing—anything, so he could yell at us again or tell us, as I’d heard him tell others, “What did you wetbacks think this was gonna be, a mother fuckin’ siesta?!”
I was afraid, so afraid that I wanted to cry out to my apá and amá to keep me safe, and if I felt this way, I wondered how Esmeralda must feel, and how my apá and amá must feel, too.
 I’m not sure how long the foreman watched over me and my family. I only know it was long enough that I forgot about him and of being afraid.
For the rest of the day I didn’t talk to my apá and amá, and they never talked to me. But after work, when we were riding in the back of the truck, going to the camp, I apologized to my apá for what I’d done.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I knew it was because he couldn’t find the words to tell me how much I’d almost cost my family, but when he finally spoke, he said one word, and one word only, the Spanish word for look. “Mira,” he said, as he lifted a finger and pointed at our family. My amá held Esmeralda in her arms. They were both asleep and my brothers and sister rode on the other side of them with their heads between their raised knees. I couldn’t tell if they were asleep or just resting.
As the truck drove on, I lowered my head between my raised knees, too. I thought about what I’d done; of what my apá must’ve said to the foreman to keep him from firing us; of Esmeralda crying; of my father yelling; of the fear in my amá’s voice; of the look in the foreman’s eyes; of my apá bowing and running back to his burlap sack; his getting back to work as fast as he could, and when it all became too much, I said a prayer to La Virgen de Guadalupe, and when I remembered that there’d be no going to church until we got back home, I began to cry, to cry quietly to myself.
The next day, and for all the days after that, it didn’t matter if the foreman was watching me or not, I worked harder than everybody else. I never said a word to my apá or amá unless they spoke to me first, and, I said a prayer to La Virgen de Guadalupe every night as we drove back to camp.
Doing all of this made me feel better, but when Sundays came I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about what I’d done and feeling sad about not being able to go to church. I missed our Sundays off from work; missed the smell of my amá’s tortillas and the chorizo burritos she made for breakfast; us dressing in the clothes our amá ironed the night before, and then driving to church, where Father Felipe waited to say, “Buenos días.”
I also missed the men talking by themselves after Mass. I watched them from La Blanca, wondering what they talked about, and when I’d be old enough to join them. Yes, I missed all of that, but most of all I missed getting to do whatever we wanted when we got back to the camp and changed out of our Sunday Best.
Sundays were the only days everyone got to do what they wanted. The youngest ran through clothes hanging on the line, played chase, or freeze tag. Those a bit older flew kites, played marbles, or pitched pennies. The oldest, those of us who, like our fathers and mothers, had grown up playing all the games that came before, now played baseball or kick ball. All the while our fathers and mothers sat around campfires talking to each other; the men in one group, the women in another, and when the day was done, families said their good nights and then drifted inside their casitas. My amá would make tortillas and cook us a special dinner. On some Sundays enchiladas, on others burritos y tacos, and still others carne asada, and always, always with a side of arroz, frijoles, chile verde, and to drink, a glass full of ice and orange Hi-C.
After we were done eating, we’d listen to Spanish music on the radio. My apá and amá played cards and dominos, while the rest of us spent time doing whatever we wanted; the only rule—the only unspoken rule—was that whatever we did, we had to do it quietly, and not because our apá and amá needed a break from all the noise, but out of respect for the suffering Christ had endured on the cross for our sins.
The next morning, the men, women and children, who the night before had been the best of friends, treated each other like strangers. It’s funny, but that’s the way our world worked: There was a time to play and a time to work.
For the rest of the time that we were there all of us worked hard, and by the time we were finished picking all the cotton, Esmeralda not only worked harder than me, her pay went from twenty-five cents back to fifty cents an hour. She never said anything bad about anything and when lunch time came she never opened her sack until the foreman said we could, but on the last day, as all the campesinos and their families waited for the foreman to show up so we could get paid, I was reminded that Esmeralda was a little girl when she cried saying adios to her new best friend, Manuelita.
By the time the foreman arrived, the men, and only the men, were already standing in a line in front of Casita #1. It was there where the foreman always set up his table to get everyone paid. This time was no different. The foreman parked his shiny Ford truck in front of Casita #2. The first two men in line helped him set up his table and chair, while the foreman took the metal box with all the money inside and sat down at the table.

​Sitting in La Blanca, I watched as the foreman handed the men an envelope with all the money they were owed, and if they had a family, the money owed to them too. No one counted their money. You were paid what you were paid. If you didn’t like it, don’t come back. As they were paid, and they turned away from the foreman, their walk was tall and proud, and their smiles grew bigger and bigger until they hugged their wives and handed them the envelopes with enough money inside to see them through the rest of the year.
Watching my apá move up in line, I wondered what he was thinking and if he’d truly forgiven me for what I’d done, but above all, I wondered when I’d be able to stand in the line with him.
With his pay in hand, my father turned away from the foreman. His walk was also tall and proud, and his smile grew bigger and bigger until he sat in La Blanca and handed our amá the envelope. My amá gave him a quick kiss and a hug and then led us in a prayer of thanks. After that, the both of them thanked me and my brothers and sisters for our hard work.
It’s funny, but I never once wondered why they got to keep all the money we’d earned. Thinking back on it now, I know it was because my apá and amá didn’t raise me to think that way. No, I always prayed and gave thanks for my family, and when I thought about how much I had almost cost them I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I didn’t because I knew a man would never do such a thing.
As always, I fell asleep on the way home, and as always, since my first year of making the trip to El Norte, I did nothing but dream of picking cotton. Sometimes, I dreamed about a row of cotton that never ended or about a bag of cotton so full I couldn’t move it no matter how hard I tried, but this time I dreamed that the foreman was seated on top of his horse yelling at me, while Esmeralda cried behind me. His eyes glowed brighter and brighter and just when he was about to destroy our world with his eyes, my apá and amá ran and stood in front of me and Esmeralda, and the foreman, seeing his power lost, turned his horse around and quickly rode him away.
I had these dreams for the longest time, and it always seemed that just when I started dreaming about something else, the time to go back had arrived.
This time was no different. Summer was almost here and with it my dreams about cotton were coming to an end. I was fourteen now, about to be fifteen. I was eager, not only to go and work, but to show my apá that I had learned my lesson from the year before.
Yes, I was ready, but this time something happened, something I did not expect. When we got home from church, my apá and amá called me and my brothers and sisters into the living room. I didn’t know what they wanted, but I knew it must be important, because it was the only time they ever talked to all of us at once.
Me and my brothers and sisters stood quietly until my apá finally spoke. “When we were little, me and your amá, we had to work the cotton fields with our families every summer. Not one time did we ever get to stay in school or have a summer to do nothing but run and play.
“It has always been our dream for our children to stay in school, and when it ended, have the whole summer to do nothing but run and play.
“Our mothers and fathers shared the same dream, but for them the dream never came true, but thanks to the money we earned as a family last year, it is a dream that has come true for me and your amá.
“This year, I will be the only one going to El Norte. All of you will stay in school and when school is over, you will have nothing to do all summer but run and play.”
Hearing this, my brothers and sisters went crazy, and Esmeralda kissed our apá and amá on the cheeks and said, "¡Gracias, apá! ¡Gracias, amá!" and then she and the rest of my brothers and sisters ran outside to play. But me? I stayed inside. I didn’t move or say anything.
My amá asked if I was okay, and when I didn’t answer, my apá said if I had something to say, to say it.
I didn’t say anything right away, but when I did, I said I didn’t want to stay home, that I wanted to go and work, that I needed to work for our family. “I want to be a man, apá, a man like you and the other campesinos.”
Finished talking, I didn’t cry, feel sad, or act silly, because I knew a man wouldn’t act that way.
When the evening before our trip arrived, I washed La Blanca and the next morning me and my apá loaded what we needed for the trip before the sun came up. We gave amá a kiss goodbye and then we got into La Blanca. A sack full of burritos rode between us and at my feet were two gallons of water with pieces of ice floating inside. My apá said a prayer for our safe travels, and as we drove away, he slowed down, and looking into the rearview mirror, said, “Mira.”
I turned and looked. My amá stood at the screen door and my brothers and sisters were outside waving goodbye. They had grown a year older, but as I turned and faced forward, I prayed, prayed that they’d remain children for as long as they could.
It took me and my apá less than six hours to drive to the office where campesinos were hired. We stopped once to use the restroom, so the line was short—as short as I’d ever seen it. Standing behind my apá, I pretended my amá was sitting in La Blanca and that we were playing Peek-a-Boo. I took a turn, and she took a turn and when we were finished, I stared straight ahead, like my apá.
When our turn came, my apá handed the foreman the letter showing he had permission to work in El Norte. After looking it over, and writing down my apá’s name, the foreman asked, “Speak-ah la English?”
As my apá said, yes, that yes, he spoke English, I wondered if the foreman ever remembered any of the campesinos he saw year after year, or even those who’d grown from boys to men right in front of his eyes, and as the foreman asked, “How many to work?” I smiled, as my apá said, “Two, only two.”
Hearing him, and with his eyes getting bigger, the foreman looked at me, not my apá, and asked, “Did he say two?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, sir, two.”
Looking like he’d just woke up from a dream, a bad dream, about cotton, the foreman stood up and looked down the line. He leaned to one side and then the other, and then he looked out the window to where the cars and trucks were parked. There were no wives or children to be seen. He lifted his cowboy hat, scratched his head, put his hat back on, and as he sat back down, he said, “What is it with you lazy Mescans, you make some good money one year and the next don't one of you show up to work.”
Me and my apá listened, but we didn’t say anything.
“One dollar and seventy-five cents,” the foreman said, as in the red book with the blue lines, he wrote the number two next to my apá’s name under the place for men.
“A camp house is twenty dollars a week. You want one?”
“Yes,” my apá answered.
There’d be no stopping at Pete’s and the park, but I didn’t let it bother me, because I knew a man never spent money he didn’t have.
The foreman wrote G-8 on the yellow card, and as he handed it to my apá, he said, “We'll expect both of you ready by six in the morning. We’ll be working Monday through Saturday. Sunday’s off. Next!”
I’d never stayed in Camp G before, but I knew it didn’t matter, because the restroom had a window—a window where I’d be able to look out on the clothes lines and the cotton fields and say a prayer of thanks for having Sundays off and for my parent’s dream coming true, and when I was finished, scratch my mark of the cross under the window.
As me and my apá walked out of the office, and past the other campesinos in line, his walk was tall and proud, and now, so was mine.
I wanted to ask him if he’d seen where the foreman had written the number two, but I didn’t, because I knew a man didn’t need anyone telling him—or showing him that he was a man. He knew he was a man and that was it, the end of the story.
Once inside La Blanca, my apá didn’t start her up right away. I knew—knew then, that he had something to say, but instead of talking, he looked away from me, and then, he made a sound, a sound I had never heard coming from him before. He started crying—crying like a man, then a young man, then a teenager, then a boy, then a baby.
I didn’t say anything, because I knew it was what a man would do. Instead, I did what I knew a son would do. I held my apá, closed my eyes, and listened, listened to time floating by. I thought about him, my amá, my brothers and my sisters, then I prayed that one day I’d be able to give them all their summers off, so they could do nothing more than run and play.

​Rodolfo Alvarado is a native of Lubbock, Texas, now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This story is based on experiences gained while working the cotton fields of West Texas as a boy with his family. His fiction and non-fiction have been published by Arte Público Press, the University of Michigan Press, Texas AandM University Press, El Central, El Editor, and Alpha Books of New York. Noted publications include,Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Michigan for Michigan State University Press and The Untold Story of Joe Hernandez: The Voice of Santa Anita. This biography won the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award and was a finalist for an International Latino Book Award. He holds a Fine Arts PhD from Texas Tech University and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ave Maria University, and Eastern Michigan University, where he was a Parks/King/Chavez Fellow and a University Fellow. This is his first story for Somos en escrito.

​By Sofia Resendiz

After two full days of driving, I can finally see the sign.

As we drive into my dad’s hometown, I’m actually surprised at how normal it looks. I had been listening to my dad go on and on about growing up in Mexico my whole life, and this was not the dying, poverty-struck place he told me about.
The cobblestone roads and tall palm trees are like something off the front of a postcard. The churches are tall and accented with large bell towers. All of the houses we pass are either made from brick or adobe, and the adobe houses are painted crazy colors like yellow or pink or orange. This place isn't dying out. It's colorful, like something out of my old books from kindergarten. I’m just about to tell dad this, but then he pulls the van over by a little orange house that looks like it’s made out of clay.
“We’re here,” he says shortly.
I actually have to hold in a cringe. My dad never talks in short, simple sentences like that unless something’s up. If this were a normal day, I’d get a goofy, “All right, m’ija, the bus is letting off now.” or something cheesy about how he and his brothers built this house “with our bare hands.” But this is not a normal day. This is the day before my grandma’s funeral, and my dad is understandably off. The entire drive from Texas, I think he said ten words to me in total. “Hey, you want to take the next rest stop, or no?”
 Part of me gets that he just lost his mom, but the other part just really wants my normal dad back. I was trying to feel sad about what was going on, I really was. I just didn’t have it in me. I never got to meet Abuela. While she was alive, she never even sent so much as a birthday card or anything, so to me, she wasn’t really more than a wallet-sized photo hanging on our refrigerator. It’s kind of hard to grieve a picture.
I hop out of the van and help unload our stuff from the back while Dad sort of stands and stares at the house. Then I realize he hasn’t been back here in over 15 years. I try and imagine how it would feel if I left our town in Texas, and came back 15 years later. Would it even feel like home anymore?
     The front door of the house opens and a petite, dark-skinned lady steps out, sees us, then walks over and hugs my dad. They look enough alike that I can tell this is my aunt, Tía Paulina. She and my dad talk for a minute, then she comes my way.
“Anna-Rosa,” she smiles. “Mi sobrina nueva.” My new niece. Then she breaks into rapid Spanish I can’t catch. I look at dad for help.
“She says you’re tall and beautiful, like your mom was,” he translates, locking the trunk of the van.
“Oh,” I say. “Um…gracias.”
“Pásenle,” she says, pointing towards the front door. And I know that’s an invite to come in, because my dad says it to everybody who comes over to our house. “Pásenle, pásenle…”
I head into the house, suitcase in hand, and it’s a lot roomier than it looks from the outside. From the front door, we walk right into the kitchen, the floor covered with large, green tiles. A hallway leads to four bedrooms. I know they’re all bedrooms, because they have no doors, just open arches covered with blankets. A girl walks out of one of them, says something in Spanish to my dad, then they hug.
“Anna-Rosa,” dad says. “This is your cousin Lupita. She just turned 16, like you.”
“Hallo,” Lupita says, flashing a pretty smile. Then she stutters through accented English. “I’m so happy to finally put a face on the mysterious American cousin.”
“Hey, that’s pretty good! Did you take English in school or something?”
“Oh, yes. Around here, we start English lessons in laprimaria.”
“That’s elementary school,” dad says.
A few minutes later, Lupita shows me her room, and tells me to leave my stuff there. Since she has a bunkbed, I’ll be staying with her the next two weeks. Then she shows me around the rest of the house.
“This is my parent’s room,” she says. “And this one is my brother Mario’s room, but he’s not home. He works in Mexico City. You meet him at the funeral.”
“Is the bathroom over by the family room or something?” I ask, realizing that I haven’t seen one anywhere in the house.
Lupita grins and points out a window that looks out into the backyard.
“You see that little thing out there that looks like a tool shed?”
“Um…yea?”
“That is the bathroom.”
“Oh.”
“Any more questions?”
“Yea,” I point to the empty bedroom at the end of the hall. “Whose room is that?”
Lupita’s face falls as she suddenly gets really interested in a spot on the tile floor.
“That was Abuela’s room,” she says.
     She looks so sad, I feel like I should apologize and say something like “Sorry for your loss”, but that wouldn’t make any sense. I’m just as much Abuela’s granddaughter as she is. Technically, it’s my loss, too. But when I try to match Lupita’s grief, I come up empty. The next few seconds are long and silent, until they’re interrupted by yelling from the kitchen. It’s my dad and Tía Paulina screaming at full volume in rapid Spanish. I haven’t heard dad like that since the time Bryan from across the street pushed me off the monkey bars in second grade. Lupita’s eyes go big as two grapefruits before she grabs hold of my arm. 

     “Vamonos. Let’s go out the back.” And in one swift move, she rushes us out of the house.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I ask once we’re outside. “What are my dad and your mom arguing about?”
She throws me a confused look.
“You dun’t know? They be arguing on the phone like that for two weeks. Ever since Abuela got sick.”
I think back and it hits me how lately dad’s been hanging up the phone just as I walk into the room.
“Whatever it is, my dad must be hiding it from me. What’s the problem?”
“Your father forgot us, that’s what’s the problem,” Lupita says. “He bought that ticket to America and never looked back. Not even when his own mother was on her death bed.”
“Now hold on just a minute. We wanted to come back sooner, but my dad has a job. If we had come down while Abuela was sick and stayed for the funeral, that would have come out to a month away from work, and we couldn’t afford that! Plus, I had finals at school. We do have lives up there in Texas, you know.”
“Well, I understand,” Lupita says. “But my mother migh' need to be a little more convince before she forgives your father for missing his last chance to say goodbye to Abuela.”
     I’ve barely met Tía Paulina, and already she was already rubbing me the wrong way. What did she expect? For us to just drop everything and−
“May I ask one question?” Lupita asks suddenly.
“What?”
“Texas really isn’t so far away. How come you and your father never come to visit?”
“And what about you guys down here?” I ask. “The phone works both ways. You guys don’t exactly call us up every Christmas. You guys never write. My mom’s mom calls me on my birthday every single year. I never got so much as a birthday card from Abuela!”
I regret that last part as soon as I say it. My dad’s voice rings through my head. “Anna-Rosa, you should never speak ill of the dead.”
“Birthday cards?” Lupita asks. She thinks for a long minute then says: “Wait right here.”
She ducks back into the house, and as I stand there by myself I think--Great. Dad and I haven’t even unpacked our bags yet and we’ve already pissed off two family members. But when Lupita comes back, she doesn’t look mad. Just…tired. She walks out of the house holding a stack of envelopes, all different sizes and colors.
“Here,” she says, putting them in my hand. “For you.”
“What are these?”
“Birthday cards. Abuela went down to the market and bought you one every year.”
I open the top envelope and out comes a glittery little card that says: HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, 2002. My heart drops into my stomach.
“She would go all the way to San Miguel de Allende,”Lupita goes on. “Just to find you cards in English. That’s a one-hour trip, you know.”
“But I don’t get it. If she went through all that trouble, why did she never send any of these?”
“Because,” Lupita says. “Every year, your father would call, saying he was bringing you to meet the family, but every year something would come up. Abuela was waiting. She was waiting to give you these cards in person.”
​

​Sofia Resendiz is an English student at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. Two of her short stories, “A Term of Respect” and “Tick Tock,” were selected for publication in the college’s literary magazine, Artifact Nouveau. Upon completing her studies, she plans to continue writing as well as teach literature at the middle or high school levels. She lives in the Stockton, California, area.