KIN

I. MOTHER & SON

“fruit”

When you describe them as fruits, I think of a tree and garden and the green or red-orange skinned objects I’d puncture with the front of my teeth and the juice that would run down the gutter of my lips,

the crescent shreds that slid down my throat.

“faggot”

It’s late autumn. The fruit has rotted, and I shovel the litterfall and duff into the soil under the trees. It’s all a matter of procreation and decomposition, of son and adult, and the set of the horizon

as two halves consume each other.

II. GRANDFATHER’S SONG

Where had his daughter brought him? The air was chilled, thin, filled with salt. The river that slit itself through the streets was a sallow washway. He reminisced, remembered Zacatecas. He had hid his memories in its dry-caked clay, the sun-stained soil crumbling between his hands, the land fleetingly under him.

Eliseo had never known the language the people in this ciudad de sal spoke. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps in the dirt of Moyahua.

He had followed the humming child from Moyahua. She had led him into the wistful song, and  from then on, he could not escape the labyrinth of its inclining tones. The face of his child, of Esperanza, the dark, recessed skin framed in wisps of silver.

Who were these strangers,

and where had God finally delivered him?

III. GRANDMOTHER

Young was one thought, too young was another. When the grandmother saw her daughter, she could not help but think of one or the other– the dishwater hair, the freckled complexion, the child at her shallow breasts.

The child had none of the mother’s or grandmother’s fairness. At first, until the child was five months, she had the usual blue eyes, piercing out from the dark, ruddy skin. By the fifth month, though, the irises pooled into melanoid rings under black curls. And how could you love anything so unfamiliar,

the grandmother considered the father,

then considered her daughter’s youth.

IV. FIRST DAUGHTER, FIRST SON

a.

A mother and daugher in one state, a mother and son in another, a father in between. It was a trial, not              an affair. An affair assumes a state of trust. These women knew better. These women knew of the other and understood the plight of their child’s paternity.

b.

The mother would recognize the handwriting when the letters came, then waited a day until the envelope was opened– top-edge freshly deckled– and hidden in a drawer beneath the father’s underwear among the rest. Placing the letter in her purse, she would wrap her daughter tightly in a blanket (it was December, her daughter born in June) and hurry to Leticia’s apartment.

“Oh. mija.” Leti’s own Arturo was babbling on her lap as the other mother rushed in. The women put aside the children, and Leti took the letter and skimmed over the slender, slanting cursive. The Spanish had an awkward formality. No one Leti knew spoke in such a way.

“Mija, mija, mija,” she said over and over as she read.

c.

The mother could no longer wait. The child was almost two months, and his father would not come. He sent money and excuses but would not come. It was enough. The money would dry-out soon enough, as well as his affection.

She ran her finger over the flat of her son’s right foot. The baby squirmed, and she held him as he whined, brought the tip of his toes, each smaller than a lozenge, to her lips and gently nibbled and kissed them until they were slightly swollen red.

le saluda atentamente,

Alecia

was how her last letter ended.

IV. MIJO

The great-grandchildren were not referred to as ‘mijo’ or ‘mija.’ That gentleness was lost, along with the other words that carried the placidity of leaves aching in a dry wind.

1. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE FIRST SON

For most of your life, you wondered about your dad, but really, it wasn’t until the car bomb in Afghanistan that you decided that resentment was not enough to keep deprived of one. And so father and first son met after twenty-six years in the Veterans Medical Hospital in DC.

And what did it matter, the things that you’d lost. Short-term memory, front row of teeth, right leg. For now you had a man who you could call father,

another prosthetic limb,

a thing without flesh or nerve or bone.

VII. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE THIRD SON

“That,” the second son was telling the third son, “is where the jotos hang out.” He pointed at a familiar set of doors under the familiar marquee of a familiar club.

The second son had been touched with the sincerity of their mother, so his younger brother knew not to argue. And what would he argue– except, perhaps, against the word joto. The third son didn’t give blow jobs to random men in bathrooms, and he didn’t grope other guys’ dicks, whether solicited or unsolicited, in public. He didn’t cruise the parks or take fists up the ass or let multiple guys dump loads in him.

He didn’t deserve the word and, as the two of them drove onto the interstate, the third son kept his eyes from meeting anything but the flickering lines between lanes that were rushing beneath them.

“So what do you want for dinner?” the elder brother asked, smiling, changing the topic as he pleased.

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Thomas Aguila is a recent MFA graduate from the Creative Writing Program at Calarts. He currently works as a writer and visual artist in Los Angeles.