Maria in Drag

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Chica had no visitors, but once received a Bible in a brown box. Color coded text, red was where Jesus came in. She spoke His lines aloud as we ate our nails. Jesus liked the lame girls. The dark girls, field hands and whores. So Chica went and fell in love with Him. Not in the conventional way – as in, Thank you Jesus for dying for our sins. But like he was that tall kid on the varsity football team and his pop, the union leader or something. Jesus was the guy for Chica.

But when He up and died on her (page 334), she hollowed The Good Book out with her teeth and stuffed contraband blades and cigarettes into its womb. The things we ached for. She bartered those things, after we’d told her our secrets. Then made fun of how we mourned our scars. They’re yours, she told us. Own them.

She made us feel shame for our shame. For fuck sake, she’d whisper. We could be super heroes! She announced in Group that there is a congregation in New Mexico that shave their heads and renounce their sex and all that comes with it. It’s old school. Those hardcore Sisters, Chica said, are a blueprint to us. The way they cleaned a switch to work it like a lover against their backs. It’s accepted through silence, and praised by God, their mute shrink. But Chica took to heat, over switches and blades. Fire cleanses, Chica said. Cutting is for pussies.

Chica said she wanted to own a piece of Everything. We said we didn’t want to own anything. But cried when we found out she had kissed us all. That she made each of us slide up our gowns (by asking) then touched where flesh became wound. We cried that she never bared herself. That she was everybody’s and no one’s. So we betrayed her. A jackal of a nurse took her Bible and we stole her file. One night when she pulled that plastic curtain together, closing us out to bathe, we read her. This made us high, to learn she was just one of us in some tough drag.

Who knew she was just some migrant worker, digging earth with hands cold and scarred as purple turnips? Until her father was shot by white men who drank the blood of Christ and cored Chica out like the fruit she harvested. That she hid her breast from us because they’d taken blades to her nipples and peeled her back like a plum. That she was then given to the nuns who caught her with a whip to save her soul and clean her cunt.  That her name was Maria. That her burn marks ran across her body like brail. One so deep, it nearly reached her heart.

And when she stepped from the bath in her thin robe, suddenly she looked small. Like a shrinking brown bird, wrapped in gauze. The kind you’d keep in shoebox and straw.

The night she left us, a naked moon hovered at heaven’s black floor. It looked like a warrior. Or something exhausted. Many stars burned and sirens rose from below like soprano monks in chant. We sat cross-legged on the Hospital rooftop because Chica had gone down on the Gatekeeper who held keys to all doors of possible death. We wept for what we had done. Couldn’t cope with the intersection of freedom where panic and relief bled out to one.

Then Chica told us she forgave us and we came undone. She got up and walked the edge, a black robe beating softly about her raw knees. Her newly sheared skull shone like an egg in cerulean light. When she reached up and put Venus out on her arm, wind blew our condolences aside. A lone pigeon teetered on them . . . then yawned beautifully away into the closed window of a building across the street, startled that its lover was made of glass.