As Luck Would Have It

Imagine thousands of millions of lights twitching along the various ceilings of New York’s five boroughs—office buildings, brownstones, townhouses, projects, and bodegas—then, poof: dying all at once. The hot trains stuck underneath the city, and all of the people crawling out of their doors, then along the wet, dark tunnels, unable to see. Arms extended in front of them like antennae as the roaches scurry away from their fingers.

My cousin’s wife tells me that after the second hour stuck underground, a businesswoman on the N train started rocking in her seat, then suddenly broke out into this monologue about terrorist attacks until a sixteen-year-old summer counselor in a JCC camp T-shirt told the woman to sit down and shut the fuck up: “You’re scaring my kindergarteners! See!” In the scant light of their cell phones, one of the five-year-olds started to weep behind his X-Men book bag.

This was the blackout of 2003.

By midnight, the Long Island and New Jersey folks trying to get home gave up and lay down on the long steps of Penn Station. They unfolded their morning newspapers and draped them across the concrete like bedsheets. The rest of the folks, who were lucky enough to be at home when the lights went out, tried to figure out how to wipe their asses in the dark and whether or not going to the bathroom really warranted the use of a candle. Later, while they slept, the food rotted inside of their warm refrigerators.

Some folks became Good Samaritans and decided to direct traffic, and some folks decided to break shit or sell eight-dollar bottles of water. I tell you, take light and air conditioning and public transportation away from a people, and watch them become who they really are.

Me?

I had to walk two hours from my job at the DMV on 31st Street to the Staten Island Ferry, which was no small task. Ever since the baby, even though it had already been a year, it was like my body was telling me to go fuck myself. True, I had little Danny, and I loved picking him up and feeding him and watching his face expand. But now, I also had hemorrhoids. In the shower, my hair came out in handfuls. And peeing was never the same again. If I laughed too happily or sneezed, that was it.

It took me six months to recover from the c-section, and every dark part of me stung. The first two weeks, my mother had to help me walk to the bathroom to pee. Moral of the story: you don’t just magically recover from trying to deliver vaginally for ten hours and then having your belly cut open and your organs rearranged instead.

By the time I got to the terminal, I was drenched in sweat. The sun was making me nauseous. A thick crowd surrounded the building, and some construction workers in front of me started talking about how the ferry service had been suspended. Indefinitely.

“Does anybody know what’s going on?” I tried to ask, but my voice got swallowed in the commotion.

And I had to sidestep a ten-year-old who was out there hustling in front of the closed-down 1 train, trying to sell me a fifteen-dollar flashlight. “You sure? I got batteries, too, miss,” he said, pointing to a Century 21 bag full of AAs.

“No, thank you,” I said, then on second thought, turned around. “All right, give me a couple of packs.”

After spending twenty dollars on batteries, I tried to inch my way closer to the terminal through the crowd.

A man sweating through his blue dress shirt paced back and forth in front of the terminal repeating one word over and over again into his Blackberry: “Unfuckingbelievable.”

***

An hour passed.

And then one more.

My mother, who was taking care of the baby at home, was more apocalyptic over the phone than ever. “Do you have your Mace? Food? Water?”

“Yes, Ma,” I said, then told her about the batteries.

“Listen, I just got off the phone with your Aunt Linda. And I want you to call your cousin Tommy and tell him to pick you up at the terminal. And also, we need eggs. And bread. And toilet paper, too. And cold cuts. Low sodium. Not the cheap stuff either, Julie. If he starts to argue about it, tell him he still owes me twenty dollars.”

Why she was asking for eggs and cold cuts when the electricity was down, I have no idea.

“That’s not really possible, Ma. The traffic’s not even moving.” And I wasn’t lying either. I had outwalked all of the cars in Midtown that were stuck on Broadway. “And what do you need toilet paper for? We have a whole closet full,” I said, which she ignored.

“You know what, sweetheart? You can walk across the Williamsburg Bridge and maybe Tommy can pick you up from there.”

The Williamsburg Bridge! I looked down at my broken Mary Janes. A blister the size of a grape was bubbling up on the back of my right ankle. “There’s no way I’m walking to Brooklyn right now, Mom.”

“So what are you going to do, Julie?” she shouted, loud enough that the person next to me heard it and chuckled.

“Why are you screaming at me? I’m not the one who did this. I’m not ConEd. I don’t control the electricity.”

“Julie, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find a seat at the terminal and fall asleep here,” I said, but when I looked around, all of the benches were taken, and there were people sitting on top of their book bags and briefcases on the floor.

My mother, she almost had an aneurysm. “The terminal!”

I had to move the phone away from my ear because that’s how loud she was.

“No, I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like it at all, you sleeping on the ground with a bunch of creeps.”

“OK, Ma, look, I gotta go.”

“Do you have money?”

“Ma, I have to go.”

“I said, ‘Do you have any money?’>TH>” she asked louder.

“Yes. Don’t worry.”

Though the truth was I only had a five dollar bill left, and all the ATMs didn’t work, so I couldn’t take out any cash.

The baby started to cry on my mother’s side, which distracted her. “OK, look, sweetheart. Just get home?”

After we hung up, I found a spot of floor next to the ATM and sat down and waited.

I never considered myself a lucky person. So I was surprised when they finally started letting people on the boat, and I was in the first group.

On the ferry, the sun fell, and everything became dark. It was the first time I’d ever seen the New York Harbor without an arc of lit-up skyscrapers.

***

This was the year I had recently started praying again. I had stopped before because of other stuff that is too long and boring to get into right now. But, basically, all you need to know is that I stopped, even in spite of my many years of Catholic school that my poor single mother worked so hard to pay for until I figured out the trick to talking to god. You can’t ask for specific things—because in the end you don’t know what’s going to be good for you. It’s like an Aesop fable: somebody makes a wish to be rich, they win the lottery or find a buried treasure, and then end up getting murdered in their sleep by their father for their money.

I never really prayed to be rich. But I did spend most of my twenties trying to ask for very specific things, and it was like I was texting god and he wasn’t returning my phone calls. On my way home after work on the bus I’d catch myself saying things like, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, please get Michael to leave his wife, already. And be a real father to Danny.” I’d say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, make Michael a better person. Get Michael to actually love me.” And god would take a while to respond. He’d see me sending out the Bat-Signal, and then like three weeks later I’d accidentally tip over a cup of coffee on the kitchen table, or an overdraft fee would land in my account. And I knew that was just god’s way of being like: Fuck Michael. So I’d tell god, I’d say: “All right, fair enough. I deserve that. I mean, it is adultery, BUT: can I at least get a job that pays me more than thirteen dollars an hour?”

And god didn’t like that, because I suppose he thought I was being cute. But for me, it was more like: I’m Just Being Real, Man. Give me a nice boss. Give me an hour for lunch. Give me SOMETHING.

And it was like god was telling me, “Stop saying ‘Give Me,’ Julie.”

But this is how I learned how to pray: That night when I finally got back to the Island, I was digging through my purse for my keys with Danny squiggling in the car seat on the stoop. I was smacking the mosquitos away from his face with the other hand. My heart started to beat faster because I couldn’t feel the keys. I couldn’t find them and my mom was at a doctor’s appointment so no one was home.

I ended up having to yank the kitchen window open and crawl over the sill, careful as I balanced myself over that window so that I wouldn’t land on the sharp raised molding of the window frame. The smell of burnt coffee hit me because I had forgotten to turn the pot off and the dishes were mounded in the sink. From inside the kitchen, I could hear the baby starting to cry.

When I scrambled back to the door, Danny was not happy. He looked up at me as if I had betrayed him, as if I had abandoned him for years on that stoop instead of just minutes to unlock the door. I knelt down to unbuckle him from the baby chair and whispered, “Stop crying, baby, my love.” Then Danny started flailing his arms when I stood up and popped me right in the fucking face. I could taste the cut on the inside of my lip opening, a sliver of blood that tasted like silver. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I put Danny down, squeezed my hands against my mouth, and said: “God, just make me happy. Whatever the fuck you want. Whatever you think will make me happy, all right?” Then it was as if he drew the clouds away to peek down at me.

Suddenly, the baby stopped. The blood inside my lip evaporated or rather retreated into the skin, rewinding itself. The apartment became still, and I felt as if I could breathe more clearly now; all of a sudden, it was as if the way I had been breathing before was not breathing at all.

***

In 2003, I had this joke. When people asked me what I did for a living, I liked to tell them I took pictures. Folks always thought that was a big thing, like I might be some type of photographer, until they realized I just worked for the DMV, where I snapped headshots of the tired and angry masses of New York City for their photo IDs.

I remember there was this one woman. When it was her turn, she started flinging her utility bills at me through the window

“Your Social,” I said, sorting through the paperwork.

“What?”

“I need your Social.”

She shook her head, the white gold infinity pendant rising and falling against her reddening freckled chest. Then she flitted through her purse until she found her Social Security card, which disappointed me.

I would have liked nothing more than to send that woman away without an ID because she was missing a required form of identification. The light on the ceiling vibrated and then dimmed.

I looked at the card, marked the paperwork, and then flicked the Social through the window back at her so that it slid a good distance across the counter and fell on the floor.

“Jesus,” she said, for a second disappearing from the window as she bent down to find the card. After a minute or two, finally she stood up.

“Look at the camera, please,” I said.

“Where’s the camera?”

I pointed at the very obvious camera hanging from the corner of the booth.

“I don’t see it.”

I pointed again. “The camera.”

“Oh, that.”

Then the woman straightened her shoulders and practiced various versions of duck face, each one sucking more of her checks underneath her cheek bones. Duck face to the left. Duck face to the right. Duck face, chin pointed down, peering straight into the camera.

This was the only part of the job I liked: watching people adjust their faces for a picture. Looking at their slight agitated movements on the screen, the way their faces twitched as they worked so hard to appear as what they wanted everybody else to see.

“You need to look straight into the camera, miss.”

I snapped a shot and caught this benevolent version of Christina Harris. Pink lipstick. Dark eyebrows. Tilting her head ever so slightly to the right so that the camera would catch her left cheekbone, the glimmering diamond in her ear.

But I sighed in pretend frustration. Made a big deal of shaking my head. “Oh, dear. It didn’t work,” I said. “Too dark. Let’s try again.”

“Really?” Christina Harris groaned, and the pink smile evaporated from her face as she rolled her eyes.

“Really. Let’s try again.”

I held my index finger above the mouse and watched the cursor waver above the little icon of the camera.

Immediately, she smiled again—the grimace gone. Even though I had tried to snap the picture quickly to capture the frown, she had somehow been able to pose and transform into sweet, kind Christina in less than half a second. In this new shot she looked as if she were playfully beckoning for whoever looked at her picture to laugh at a joke.

“Ugh,” I said. “Can you keep your head still?”

“What?”

“You moved too quick, and now the picture’s blurred.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said.

Then she pinched her lips in frustration, which was when I finally caught the shot of her face that I wanted. Lopsided and unsymmetrical.

But I pretended that I hadn’t taken the picture yet.

“OK, one, two, three, now smile,” I said.

Again, kind, playful Christina radiated from the frame, an eyebrow aggressively raised, her mouth wide open as she smiled, but of course I had beat her to it and already taken the picture to capture who she really was. “Got it!”

“Is it good?” she said.

“Very good.”

“Could I see it?”

“Sure.” I grinned and turned the computer around so she could glimpse the screen which caught her face pinched in anger.

“Oh.” She grimaced at the photo. Horrified.

And there was nothing as satisfying as watching her realize how ugly she looked in all of her condescending anger.

“You’ll get your ID in the mail in three weeks,” I told her. “Please step aside.”

Then I apologized to god for my pettiness and pressed a button for the next person to come up.

***

Weekdays that whole year, I woke up at six in the morning, crept quietly past my mother’s room to make sure she was OK, and put the coffee on while I showered. Afterwards, in a towel, I’d bump into my bedroom in the dark to search for a pair of stockings that still fit me. By that time, the baby would be crying, reaching his hands toward the blue night-light glowing above his bed. And I’d feed him while my mother poured herself a cup of coffee.

Before I left, she would take Danny from my arms and whisper in his ear, “Who’s the handsomest baby in the world? Who is he?”

Danny would return her question with wet laughter, his fat arms reaching for her face.

“You are! You are, my love.”

***

There’s a quiet section of the boat where people are supposed to not talk or make loud noises. Mornings I would sit there and close my eyes sometimes to try to get another twenty minutes of mediocre sleep while the boat moved across the water. One terrible morning I needed this sleep so badly, I used my purse as a pillow and leaned my head against a column. The buckle was pinching my cheek, so I took my scarf off and wrapped it around my purse.

My mother had been up that night sick, the worse she’d been in a while, and I couldn’t bear to leave her like that alone all night, sitting on the couch wincing in front of the TV. We drank coffee and watched old Law & Order episodes until three thirty in the morning, when we fell asleep together on the couch. Two hours later, I woke up.

On the boat, just as I wavered off to sleep, I heard a thump. Somebody had dropped a heavy bag of what sounded like metal on the floor next to me. I’m not opposed to people noisily sitting down. It’s a free country. But then, just as I was about to fall back to sleep, I opened my mouth, breathed in, and swallowed what smelled like a combination of scrambled egg and sauerkraut.

And here is where I object: farting at six thirty in the morning next to a defenseless sleeping person—now, that is unforgivable. I opened my eyes to look at the perpetrator, who was beginning a very loud conversation on his phone in the Quiet section, mind you. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him right away until he shouted, “These people are unfuckingbelievable.”

It was the man who had been pacing back and forth in front of the terminal the day of the blackout. Now he waved an agitated fist to punctuate each syllable as if he were knocking on a door with his curled up index finger. “Just tell her we’ll put up more money for the street fair.” When he bit into his bacon, egg, and cheese, the yolk spilled down his lip and dripped onto his blue tie.

“Shit.” He took a napkin out and tried to wipe the yolk away with a downward motion that only pushed the yellow goo further into the fabric. “Just buy them a fucking bouncy house or something. Jesus, it’s not that difficult. Do we really have to spend this time arguing over an elementary school Halloween party?”

He was shaking his head now.

“You know what? I don’t care about Mrs. Ellen. If Mrs. Ellen has something to say to me, tell her to come to the office and say it to my face. She thinks just because she rules that fifth grade, she can talk to whoever, however she wants to talk to. Well, you know what, I’m not eleven years old. And not for nothing, you think that school would be a little bit more grateful that Richard, Ross, and Russo is donating to their Halloween events.”

It went on like that for another ten minutes until he lost connection in the middle of the water. “Sarita?”

Nothing.

“Are you there? Sarita? Goddamnit.”

He sighed, pulled the phone away from his face, and looked around self-consciously. Then closed his eyes and began to snore so loudly that I just stood up, gathered my things, and made my way to the front of the boat.

***

The DMV is like purgatory, and there’s no telling how long it will take before they let you out for your sins. We liked to call Barbara the gatekeeper. She was this child-sized Puerto Rican woman who herded folks into different lines.

We all laughed when once a confused teenage boy trying to take his permit test came up to her and asked, “Do you work here?”

She looked at him and frowned: “Unfortunately.”

The next minute a construction worker, who’d been pushing his bag of tools with his foot, put his hands up and said “Motherfucker” upon realizing he had been waiting on the wrong line for a half an hour. His orange cap swung from his belt in anguish.

“You mean I have to come back?” another woman said to the teller at a window, her two-year-old pouring orange juice on her foot. “I can’t get another day off of work.”

On the radio, Bette Midler sang “god is watching us” the whole time.

Later, a skinny woman came up to my kiosk. She had short, thin, silvery-brown hair that looked like it was growing in, while some pieces were broken. When she came up to the counter, she placed a folder through the slot and smiled politely, saying, “Good morning. How are you today?”

She was missing one form of ID, but since she played ball and actually exhibited genuine manners, I waited for her while she looked through her purse until she found it.

When it was time for her picture, I pressed the button, took the photo, rotated the screen, and showed her the shot. It was a routine gesture that I must have made a million times, but I wasn’t expecting what came next.

The woman looked at the screen and began to cry. “I’m sorry. I just.” She paused. “The chemo’s really fucked up my hair. It’s hard for me sometimes to see it.”

My mom had been going through this, too. For her the worst thing was not being able to eat. At one point I had spent hours at the stove making my mother risotto, her favorite. But when she ate it, she began to cry. She couldn’t stand the mush in her mouth. The flavor. My mother pushed the plate away, then said, “All I taste is blood.”

“This camera isn’t forgiving,” I told the woman in front of me now. “It’s not you. It’s just the computer.”

She’d started to cry harder, so I found some Kleenex in my purse and passed it to her through the window.

“You know what? Forget it. Forget this picture. Let’s get rid of it.” I turned the screen back toward me. “Let’s try again.”

She’d closed her eyes and put one hand over her chest, the other over her mouth, and in this way it looked as if she were praying.

“You ready? How about now?”

She opened her eyes and nodded.

“I want you to look directly at the dot. Yup, just like that. Beautiful. Now lift your chin up a little bit and smile.”

She followed the directions, and I snapped the shot.

Afterwards, I looked at the picture hopefully. But the smile looked forced, and she was gritting teeth as if she couldn’t breathe.

“It didn’t work,” I told her, deleting the picture. “Let’s try again.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “Don’t trouble yourself.” Then she smiled the way she did when she said good morning, and I clicked the mouse.

Quickly, the pixels shifted across that half a second. “There! We got it.”

I turned the screen around so she could see the photo. This time the harsh glint of the fluorescent light didn’t flash against her scalp. Instead, the camera captured the wide energy of her eyes. The generous smile. And I hoped that, looking at the picture, she could see it too. All the things that chemo could never take away from her.

***

One morning, I was running late to the ferry because Danny was not having it. The beginning of his teeth were cutting through his gums, so for the past week he’d been inconsolable. I needed to skip the shower and cajole him while my mother stood there, making all types of funny faces until he accepted her arms.

I made the boat by seconds. As the doors slid shut behind me, I followed the 7:00 a.m. crowd onto the mouth of the boat, where a thin fog hung around the ramp connecting the ferry to the pier. Inside, I had to hustle. The boat was so packed that people were sitting on the stairs. Normally, I would have just stood, but the morning drama with the baby and the run for the boat had left me exhausted.

When I did find an open space it was next to the loudmouth lawyer, same blue tie but free of yolk. And, of course, he was on the phone. Though I was too tired to care.

I waved a hand in front of him and pointed to the empty space beside him so that he could move a little bit, to which he sighed and shifted over begrudgingly.

“Thanks,” I said. “Look, what a gentleman.”

But he was so worked up on the phone that he didn’t hear me. His cheeks were flushed. “You know what the sad part is, Sarita?” Then he lowered his voice. “I knew he was going to pull some shit like that. Ten years as a lawyer, and it never fails. People always do desperate things in desperate situations.”

Which of course made me think about Michael, the desperation part, and how when I’d told him about Danny, he looked at me and said, “So what are you trying to do here, Julie?”

We were sitting there beside each other on the deck, looking out at the dark water blending into the sky. I stood there, quiet. I felt like he’d knocked me in the fucking chest.

“You must think I’m real stupid, huh?”

Then he cut me off completely.

Didn’t pick up my phone calls or answer my emails, so that at one point I got so frantic I drove all the way to Tottenville after work and showed up at his house, this ugly expensive new town home positioned right at the curve of a cul-de-sac, connected to three other houses with the same white aluminum siding and gray roof.

Once there I watched his wife laughing on the steps, gossiping with a neighbor, before going inside the house. She had long, straight, almost black hair that reached her waist. And I was surprised. The woman was much prettier than me. The way Michael used to talk about her, you would never know it. I couldn’t imagine why Michael would want to sleep with me instead of her.

I sat there for a couple of minutes with the air conditioner on full blast, my thighs sticking to the seat, until an old man knocked on my window asking me to move because I was blocking his driveway.

So I turned the car around and left.

***

At night, while Danny crawled around the coffee table and tried to stand up, my mother told me, “You underestimate yourself.” She got like this sometimes after too many hours of Dr. Phil.

I picked up her unfinished plate of lasagna and laughed it off. “I don’t underestimate myself, Ma.”

“I just think you have so many skills. You were always so much smarter than Kathy’s daughter. Jesus, you had to teach her how to use her LEGOs. Remember that? And now look who’s the doctor.”

My mother was always talking about people becoming doctors. That was the way she was.

I moved into the kitchen to start the dishes, turning the water on to block out her voice as she admonished Danny for reaching toward the little eyebrowless Precious Moments figurines she’d arranged on the end table: “No, don’t do that, baby. Don’t touch that. No good. Bad.”

When I had gotten pregnant with Danny, I gave my mother the news at an Applebee’s and started to blubber right there next to a table of teenagers singing out “Happy Birthday.”

She looked at me and said, “It’ll be okay, baby. We don’t need anybody else.” Then reached across the table and held my hand.

Of course, she didn’t imagine then that she would get sick.

“Look at me Julie,” she said. “Have we ever needed anybody else?”

“No, never.”

And to this day, even though she is gone, I don’t think anybody in the world ever loved or understood me as much as my mother.

***

The next day, on the way back home to the Island from work while the boat was getting ready to dock, I heard the lawyer, my morning commute nemesis, before I saw him. Phone tucked between his shoulder and chin, a steaming black cup of coffee in hand with no lid. I stood at least four people behind him in order to avoid any interaction, but as luck would have it, the crowd moved in such a way that I found myself standing right beside him. A woman with her carriage stopped abruptly because her daughter had dropped a bottle, and when she bent down to pick it up the lawyer bumped into her and his hot coffee spilt sideways all over my coat.

“Oh my god, miss. I am so sorry,” he kept saying, holding his hands out in apology.

And this is where I finally lost it. “Can’t you look where the fuck you’re going? Jesus, who walks around with no lid on their coffee?”

The surrounding crowd was becoming irritated with the both of us as they made their way around our argument.

“Come on, lady, give me a break. I said I’m sorry.” Then he offered me a greasy napkin streaked with ketchup from the bag holding his bacon, egg, and cheese.

Which was when it all happened.

A noise roared and ripped through the air as if a bomb had exploded. The floor and the walls vibrated, and all of us jerked forward. From a distant spot in the front of the boat, people started to scream, and it took me a moment to realize that the boat was crashing into the pier. The concrete and wood of the dock were tearing into the vessel.

The lawyer’s eyes widened as his phone fell from underneath his chin. “Move,” he shouted.

My whole body was shaking, and at first, I couldn’t go. My legs felt like they’d been deflated, but then the lawyer yanked my arm and pulled me away from the falling debris. Behind us the dock continued to eat the boat, cutting through the seats and the walls and the windows and the bodies of passengers who stood too close to the front and couldn’t get away fast enough from the advancing metal.

At one point somebody knocked me down while they were running. And as I fell, my hand slid along the lawyer’s wrist. He turned around and grabbed my elbow again to straighten me back up. And we took off.

But if he would have left me there like that, if I would have stayed down on the floor of the boat, if he would have kept on running, the pier would have cut me in half.

After the boat finally stopped, all of us crowded to the furthest edge of the vessel and waited. We thought we were sinking or that maybe the boat had been under some terrorist attack. The lawyer stood beside me searching for his cell phone, which he’d lost when we were running.

“Unfuckingbelievable,” he said. “Oh, somebody is definitely getting sued.”

***

Much later we learned that the pilot, whose back had been throbbing for days, took too many painkillers and, exhausted, had fallen asleep while navigating the boat. Since he was the only one in the pilot house, nobody had slowed the ferry down when it was time to dock. Instead, it went on at full speed and didn’t stop.

Immediately after the crash, the pilot went home and tried to kill himself. Unsuccessfully, though. He survived and ended up doing three years in prison. But what stays with me always is not the pilot’s story, or the way he cried during the trial, or the bloodied bodies, or even the victims’ families. What I still think about sometimes, almost fifteen years later, is running away from the pier, and how when I fell it was Andrew who bent down to help me stand up. Sometimes in my dreams, I am still running away, except this time I am trying to escape this tall quick wave of darkness.

Every now and then, remembering it, I’ll tell Andrew, “Oh man, I hated you. Sometimes I still can’t believe that you stopped.”

And always he’ll kiss me on the side of the head and say something like, “Come on, what type of asshole do you think I am?” Then, while turning off a light before bed, or placing a hand on my knee in the car, or while running hot water over a stack of dirty dishes after dinner, he’ll say, “Accept it, Jul. Sometimes, people are not as ugly as you think.”

______

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is a PhD student in English with a concentration in ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. Recently, she was a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Her short story collection Staten Island Stories is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins in December of 2019. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in BOAAT, New Madrid, Afro-Hispanic Review, PANK, el roommate, District Lit, The Toast, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.