Latinx

Heredia Becomes America

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By Marcus Clayton

rascacielos son arbol con ventanas. lo siento. papi says to say, “skyscrapers,” because that is what we are supposed to call them now. people inside the trees see us fly. we fly to them—papi says “asi es como aceptan.” hummingbirds sing inside the crown. el sol de ellos es mio tambien. i want to rest on their boughs to watch the sun the way they do, un feliz perezoso asleep in the security of skyscrapers Heredia could not grow.

***

The red eyed tree frog lives in the rainforests of Costa Rica. Eyes glow the color of blood to ward off hunters, to make them believe frogs can eat a lion whole. It climbs branches with suction cup toes and can reach the tops of leaves with ease. Its skin blends into these leaves to hide from predator teeth, to become foliage, to pretend to be Earth.

The red eyed tree frog only looks for a partner in the rain. Gray clouds ward off heat and liquid helps to slip out of claws. When red eyed tree frogs mate, they wait until nightfall. They wait for stars to be the only eyes that stare back into the red—the non-violence is an aphrodisiac. When they are good and ready, they lay eggs on the underside of leaves, hanging just above the safety net of water. The Earth will hold their children with its green hands, a midwife grown from the dirt.

***

Mamá is 42, and she hates dogs. “We had a German Shepard for six years before you were born,” she told me. “His name was Ace. Big, loud, and he scared the neighbors. The white people on the block would look at Ace with fear, then look at us with disappointment that we had that giant beast in our yard. The holes he left in the grass and the bite marks carved into our Sarchi chairs kept me from wanting to go outside when he was awake.

“But your grandparents loved Ace. Papi said every good American family had perritos, I guess. He said the white people looked at us with jealously, that they wish they had a dog so big. They wish their dog could hop a 6-foot gate in a single jump to scare off thieves. He said they should feel lucky Ace didn’t jump over and eat the gringos that gave us attitude.

“Over time, he tore up more of the home and had accidents more frequently. Pieces of all our Sarchi furniture were scattered everywhere like dust, and Ace’s gums bled with papi’s precious grass caught between the teeth. Our family started feeling the embarrassment I felt whenever Ace would do something destructive. We got the wrong kind of attention from the gringos. I don’t remember what the last straw ended up being—maybe mami’s patio smelled too much like pee—but I remember the day we gave him away everyone cried except me. I was excited when Ace’s new family pulled up to the driveway; the smiling almost hurt me.”

Mamá told me this story every time I even hinted at wanting a pet. However, I was an only child by blood, so the desire for extra companionship could never fully extinguish. Once, in my early teens, I told Mamá I wanted a Jack Terrier Russel. They are small and friendly and cannot intimidate passersby if they tried. I went to bookstores and libraries to read up on taking care of Jack Terrier Russels, and gave her an encyclopedic rundown of just what it entails. She refused because they pee on things.

“That’s what perritos do,” she said. “Pee on things.”

Mamá hated any mess she didn’t know how to immediately clean up, especially by babies and dogs: neither can speak to Mamá the way she knows how to speak. Accidents will happen, and she will be forced to clean up after a creature who had no chance of telling her what they truly wanted. “At least babies grow up and learn how to speak,” she’ll say. “Animals don’t talk. They just pee on things. Peeing when they’re not supposed to. They don’t have words, just violent barks.”

“I still don’t know Spanish,” I often reminded. “Does it make me an annoying baby when you’re talking to grandma and I don’t know what you’re saying?”

Mamá never taught me Spanish, often blaming Pops—“he never learned Spanish either, so he didn’t want us talking shit behind his back,” she’ll say, passively blaming his blackness. Other times, she’ll begin to retell her story of coming to America in the third grade, then stop to say, “I just wanted you to avoid some stuff I went through coming here.” By the time I made it to grade school in South Gate, the whites had flown. I was not only the one kid in school who did not know Spanish, I was also one of the only kids who whose family didn’t have a dog. 

 Instead of a Jack Terrier Russel, I was gifted a turtle. His name, at first, was Squirtle. Then I turned thirteen and his name was Mortimer. My parents could never stand the smell of his tank, and I said, “I’ll clean it in a second,” too often. Pops cleaned it for me when I took too long to get to it, and eventually stopped waiting for me altogether. I started to forget how to take care of Mortimer, forgot how to clean his tank, never learned what kind of food he liked best. Eventually, he stopped being Mortimer and just became “my turtle,” then “the turtle.” Within a year, Pops got fed up with cleaning after the turtle when I didn’t. One night, an unfortunate father-son blow up led Pops to take the tank out on to the street and leave it by the curb where families left box springs and used furniture to be given away. Between the reticence of Pops and I, Mamá let a passing and curious family keep the turtle. Pops was horrified, hoping to bring the turtle back in after I had learned my lesson. I spent the night crying, losing out on a pet that I barely touched. Mamá was fine, watching her shows and laughing the night away as though nothing happened.

I still wanted a Jack Terrier Russel. I knew I could love it despite the pee. I knew I could look beyond the panting and barks to hear the voice of love. Though, I could never convince Mamá, who once tried to pet a friend’s dog at a birthday party—a concession, a way to see the fuss—until its teeth ate through her windbreaker’s arm.

***

This land is ____ land, this land is my land

(¿Dónde está el baño?  ¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Dónde está el baño?)

from California to ___ ___ Yo(u)r_ Island

(¿Where está el baño? Where está el baño?)

From the _______ forest, to the ___ ___ waters

(Where es el baño? Where es de baño?)

This land was made for ___ ___ me

(¿Where is ___ bathroom? ¿Por favor?)

***

Yellow-bellied sea snakes absorb a third of their oxygen from seawater. They are marvelously slim, and they hunt for food in aquatic life. Normally, yellow is only prominent on native snake’s belly, hidden from view of red eyed predators as it slithers along surfaces. Its back, the most prominently seen feature of the snake, is a distinct brown that leaves it invisible when it moves. Some yellow-bellied sea snakes in Costa Rica, however, are completely yellow, abandoning the brown all together to remain seen within the sea. For food, the yellow-bellied sea snake can eat several frog eggs from under a leaf in just one bite. 

***

Mamá is 19, and The Virgen de Guadelupe stares at her uterus. The Planned Parenthood hidden just far enough from her parent’s view is still infested with picket signs—ventriloquist dummies whittled by Bible verses translated by white kings. Nonetheless, Mamá knows she cannot have a baby right now. Pops holds his hands over her ears, and the vitriol becomes a low hum of a bad song.

Pops just turned 18 and knows his black skin makes the white protestors hate him, too. He and Mamás know race mixing would frighten her parents just as much as these protestors, would make her parents cry like the white Jesus superglued to cardboard and stood next to the clinic’s door, would disappoint her parents like the day Pops met them for the first time.

“¿Él es negro?”

“Yes! So? I love him!”

Now neither of my parents want to disappoint the elders, and they rush inside the building as though running from firebombs. Pops holds Mamá as the barks shot through protestor teeth dissolve into the mute blues and whites of scrubs and coats. They are fully muted when the red comes out of her, and she eats her screams with her thighs warmed by blood she was not ready to know. Pops cups Mamá’s ears again on the way out, but the sound is gone. Protester howls sound caught underwater, and The Virgin’s green shawl watches Mamá without judgement.   

Mamá is 39, and I ask her politely for a sibling. Brother. Sister. Someone else to call her “mother.” I am confused to see her cry when I am still waiting on an answer.  

***

PINCHE PERRA MALA!

PERRA MALA!

STUPIDA! PUTA! PENDEJA!

STUPIDA!

***

mi cama está llena de tierra, pero está bien. they tell me cucarachas walk on my arms when i sleep, but i do not feel them. papi says we do not need outhouses in America, that we can stay inside when storms are too loud for the bathroom. we leave soon, but for now the rain stains the outhouse with water, y mi pijamas está empapas—they cling to my body like dirt that will not wash off my skin. i wonder if America lets bug sleep without us? if toilets can be left inside while everything stays dry.

Outside, i see Heredia’s hills become light; orange streetlights are haloes, convertirse en estrellas bajo la lluvia.

***

The northern cat eyed snake, scientifically known as the leptodiera, colloquially known as, “Oh, shit! What is that?!” has a bite that only affects a human’s pain receptors as much as a bee sting since its venom is too mild to stun. No matter, when the northern cat eyed snake is hungry, and cannot find an adult red eyed tree frog, tadpoles make an exquisite alternate meal.

***

Mamá is 30 and celebrates her birthday in the hospital. I have only been alive for one month, but my lungs have already failed. It started with food unable to enter my stomach, but the wheezing frightened her the most. To this day, she doesn’t remember the diseases’ name, and maybe that’s the way to kill the poison of memory.

 She watches incubators spread past the viewing window like a minefield. I am a scorched shell with napalm drool coughed out of the mouth. Nurses ask if she needs coffee, or water, or food. Mamá fights to not say, “I want air in my baby’s lungs. Can you get me that?” and instead, “no, thank you,” with barren breasts, eyes locked on her suffocating bomb.

She refuses to admit she never wanted children, never wanted a child to know how painful it is to fight to live. America was meant to let her and her family live without repairs, to be welcomed with a culture worth sharing and synthesizing. Now her newborn son is already dying. Mamá prays he will have words to say, “I am ok now,” but his mouth is coated in saliva from the violent coughs deafening the hospital.

The disease will let me live, and my stomach will have a deep scar on the right side of my abdomen. Mamá looks at the wound as a failure, a reminder of battles she wanted me to avoid whose fists found my bones anyway. Thirty years later, the scar still brands me like a prison tattoo—like any good child of an old-fashioned Latina, I keep my shirt on around her to hide the ink, keep her thinking my skin is pure.

Mamá is 31 and decides against a second child. She argues with Pops, who had hoped her now tied tubes would expel one or two more siblings for me. This lasts years, maybe even a lifetime. But Mamá doesn’t fear umbilical cords around her baby’s neck anymore. Rosary beads no longer fissure her palms. She did not leave Heredia to watch children die.

***

the american kids laugh without me.

 jajajas.

 my mouth is closed. i cannot make jello sound like yellow the way they want it. i cannot open my mouth fast enough to show them my tongue is the same colors as theirs. their flag—the whites, the reds, the blues, “son mios tambien!”

pero, como se dice “where is the bathroom” en ingles? no one will tell me. does it translate to, “please stop threatening my auburn hair. please stop telling me my tiara is rusted. please let me go to the bathroom because i thought i escaped the pain of storms that eat my roof like a predator. if i mutate my words into yours, make sure my babies do not make the mistake of sharing my language, will you let us go? if i turn my hair jello, will you stop laughing?”

i do not know how to talk to teacher, now my feet drown in pee—teacher thinks that’s just what i do. he confiscated my tongue when i couldn’t say his words.

a b cs erase ah beh cehs

my nose is wet with shame rubbed into pee stains.

now i see fangs instead of hummingbirds—they swim in the jello around my ankles. they hiss like bombs that take skyscrapers away from the eyes of airplanes.

***

Mamá is 60, and she never learned that the red eyed tree frog’s tadpoles—native to her motherland—can survive without permission. They will walk one day, proving they never knew what teeth felt like on their new skin. Tadpole’s eventual suction cupped limbs keep them clung to Earth. Mamá should watch them walk in the rain to find safety in the cleansing water. Maybe then, she will believe it when they learn to scale skyscrapers; they’ll make homes high in the branches where no fangs will reach their legs, where a tadpole’s eyes will adjust and scare predators the way their mother’s eyes kept them safe from yellowed bellies.

“How come you didn’t just move back to Costa Rica?” I ask her after I tell her about another failed dog. For six days in my late 20s, I cared for a Terrier mix. He was a puppy and not house trained. I lived alone and worked nonstop as an adjunct college instructor to try and make ends meet. The Terrier never listened, never learned, peed everywhere. On the third day, I tried to pick him up to stop him from biting another piece of furniture, but he slid through my hands and collided with the linoleum like a meteor. I held him afterward, the warmth in my arms begging his fur for forgiveness. On the sixth day, I gave him to a new family, relieved he was no longer in danger from being loved by me.

Mamá tells me about Ace all over again, tells me about the holes and the barking. She segues into language again, why she never taught me Spanish—how cruel third graders can be to a foreigner trying to learn how to ask for the bathroom. Now I am the age she was when I was in the hospital, and I reminisce about our family visits to Costa Rica—how free she looked speaking only Spanish to her loved ones, how dry she stayed basking under the Tico sun.

“You obviously miss it.”

Mamá doesn’t answer my question, but she shows me a picture of herself in the third grade. Here, she had been away from Costa Rica only days. Here, she didn’t know the other kids were afraid of roaches. She has dyed her hair blonde since the 80s, but here her hair is a lifegiving shade of tree bark; a Ticas’ crown whose radiance blinds the whites.

“My nose was so big here, huh?!” she asks, trying to laugh. “The kids used to make fun of that, too. Said it looked like a dog’s nose.”

“No,” I say. “Your nose is a fine nose.”

It is a perfect nose. She stands in the photo among a morning glow, soaking every bit of the sun. Here, her posture sings futures. Here, trees surround her inside the frame like a cornucopia exhaling a ripe fruit of the womb. Here, she smiles despite venom; a smile that protects her tongue from snakes. Here, she knows no English, but she is an American child who survives.

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afro-Latino writer from South Gate, CA, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and is an executive editor for Indicia Literary Journal. Some published can be seen in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Apogee Journal, The Adroit Journal, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry among many others.

Antiphony: Murmur of Crows

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By Xavier Anthony Vazquez

After El Paso

at sunset/flocks will swirl/in pink and lavender/a divested music 
of wings/a coiling dance amiss over head
an overcast chaos aflight, a dusk chorus lamenting/dark bodies collide/ frantic ellipses flicker
the sky, thin curtain between metaphysics and mythology crumpled/a road of witness 
takes in the snarl and holy mess of molecular precision: teeth of feathers, 
their movements harmonic as a head of hair/oblique assembly, a body as one 
as air, shadowing wings a foreshadowing/& now pinions are known to hatch migrating winds

a fading whistle  of reign/ a scheme, discordant scenes 
unwound  and foiled/an instant of burst ire close enough to the border
to stop shrapnel from softening heartbeats in the heat of its procreation,
it’s winter for the faction/watch them
retreat their meticulous design of taxidermal violence/watch them 
retire their shaded partitions of plumage 

nest embers won’t smoke tonight’s air/ won’t whiten 
nest ash of foreign caw and sweat,
there will be no -cides tonight, no sides 
tonight/no frantic law of flight

this congregating spring of strangers/won’t need paper
to nest in the solace of numbers/primacy will be foreign 
to the foreign
a crow’s nest of fraying flag and scraps of white/remnants of a vacant shrine,
a diversity of beaks pitching resounding picks, pecks a mur

                                                                                         mur

                                                                                             mur

                                                                                      mur

an overcast chaos aflight, a dusk chorus rejoicing,
dark bodies make rounds,
a caucus unbound/gathers life mid-flight

a caw echoes off/the last of their rule, their ruses!
for the last time, the sky bruises

Xavier Anthony Vazquez is a writer & educator based in New York City. He graduated from St. John’s University studying government & international relations. In addition to those areas of thought, some themes that continue to inform his work are the nature of quantum consciousness, the relation of haunting & hallowed spaces, as well as the surreal & sublime. His work can be found in Raptor Editing’s The Great Good News of Your Own Voice among other spaces.

A Murder of Crows

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By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

After El Paso

we expect at sunset/that flocks will swirl/in the pink and lavender/of dusk, its unisons and calm/a diverse murmur of wings/a coiling dance, high over head

Xavier writes me about something amiss/a chaos in flight, dark bodies colliding, a clapcloud pandemonium/a wretched sky pining after a mythology/of metaphysical prominence, props for the preened/how the vanishing point of long highway road forces us to look up, to take in the snarl and holy mess of molecular percussion/teeth of feathers interrupting/flight paths charted out against maps and before/pinions were known to catch migrating wings/the bristle of vanes

in the machinery’s grind and coil/we thought it was the noonday sun blinding us/as it fell once again at the end of the world/a red pinwheel hibiscus spinning down jouncing/a short burst fire close enough to the border to hear ice crackle in the heat of concentrations/enter the fiction that all birds in a flock are Birds/enter the meticulous design of epidermal violence/the hierarchy of feathers/the tyranny of skin

enter the crow that will kill a crow if it does not arrive already citizen to the flock/if it bursts in with a foreign caw and sweat/congregating spring of paperless strangers/in the solace of numbers/portrayed as a corvid conspiracy

a crow in a crow’s nest of country flag and white/an improvised blind/pitching out sounds/picking pecking

we want the flock/to round and round/murmur of wings readying toward night

but we find a chaos, dark bodies colliding in pandemonium/a ruckus of rounds feeding death mid-flight

a caw in echo bouncing off the force of blue, a vaunt of dominion in a wretched sky

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, & activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poems have been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets, Raspa, Feminist Studies, & Huizache, among other places. 

El Moro

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By David M. de León

The park will remain open during the lapse of appropriations     using recreation fee revenue and donations    Hazardous or dangerous conditions may exist please plan accordingly         Historic Site parks will remain accessible     with basic services to the public     (Restroom Out of Order)

In 1625 the Dutch occupied San Juan for three months but couldn’t take the Castillo San Felipe del Morro. When they retreated they razed the city to the ground. A Spanish victory.

*

What fort builders called a “field-of-fire” or a “killing field.” After decommission the field hosted over two hundred trees. Visitors would walk down an avenue of sea pine and coconut palm. In the ‘90s the trees were removed to “protect the historical scene” of the fort. Removing the trees meant: wind. Removing the trees meant: erosion.

*

After the Dutch, the English, after the English, the Americans. America you were never medieval but how medieval you have been. Your smiling machine. Your gilded teeth. Your cruise ships and their cargoes. America you’re caught in a stray cat’s jaws. The frogs laugh all night.

*

This is where the soldiers fed on island food. This is where the non-native hogs were split and roasted. Where the fat in rinds crackled. Where the fruits were sucked. A plaque shows a man darker than me carrying a bowl of what? The royal palm of borikén carried no coconuts. They must have dreamed it up. They must have imagined the flesh and the milk. In the mud, the fragrant mud, the fragrant mud pink as flesh.

*

Don’t cry, brittle bone. Nothing here dies. This is truth, which some would call magic. Is this why the Europeans came and kept coming? Why they dropped their mortars and anchors? Their churches? Is it why the cemetery sits on the lap of the sea?

*

A channel cut in the rock of the fort sloshes sewage down around and under, visiting every embankment, delivering to all shit, bidding all shit, spreading in the close air the human flavor and grace. Shit of European, African, Indio, Mestizo, slurried and sloughed together. I felt my bowels pack while walking the walls, felt my intestines swell like a tourist. Felt it as it bade me shit to the mouth of the bay.

*

The tourist lavatories were built into storerooms with great wide triangular openings to the air. They overflowed already and there are no appropriations to clean them. The wind takes and scatters the stench to all and everywhere like salt.

*

O conquistadores, O walking, shuffling, conquering membranes of shit, disease, and new growth. As the Dutch shat on the Spanish, as the cannons shat on the English, as the soldiers bayonet the shit out of each other.

*

El Morro (headland, snout, nose, gall) is not el moro (moor, foreigner, conqueror, dark one). Moorish kingdoms in Spain until 1491. Then, 1492. But look how they are conquered. What Moten calls resistance of the object. Look at your skin, look at your noses, your gall. El Morro, headland of failure, la Mora, bruja, reina of morning, smirks and touches her neck.

*

On the walls the wind tries to murder us and we know this is dangerous this is a measure of its love. To not accept this is to pour death in your molds, into the cannisters of your veins, to hold it in like shit.

*

Flies dance on the head of a cannon. Dance out a new year. The magi will bring gold, gunpowder, and linseed oil. They pay homage and cackle mirthlessly. They dance that the rocks will pass out and through the bowels of the sea.

David M. de León is a Puerto Rican writer, academic, and theater artist from New Jersey. Creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The Acentos Review, At Length, Pleiades, Fence, DIAGRAM, Bat City Review, 2River View, and Strange Horizons. He is a Phd candidate at Yale university, where his research is on contemporary book-length works by Black poets. David is also a playwright and a screenwriter.  http://davidmdeleon.com

Paris in Texas

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By Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera

Isabel gripped the doorknob tightly, stepped out the back door and onto the back step. The tall old salt cedar trees cast wide shadows that didn’t quite reach her, until the sun fell behind Coyote Mountain.

Yoli reached out to hold Isabel’s hand, distracted for a moment by two neighbors from across the circle.

“Hello there!”

“Como sientes?”

Yoli waved and whispered, “They are loud when they – you know.”

“Do I look like I care about their sex life?” Isabel scowled. “I almost died. The doctor said I lost a lot of blood in there.” But she didn’t look at Yoli, hid how grateful she felt for this loss. She didn’t need two more children. Five at home was enough. She squinted into the sun, tried to conjure the faces of her two oldest sons, the baby she’d left behind and the one who’d been stolen from her. She hoped Jaime had learned a lot from Miss Julie, gone to college like her son had. David would be in high school now, probably had a new mother, more siblings. Probably didn’t know she existed.

Isabel dropped a yellow cushion onto the concrete and sat near her new plants. She stared at them, knew they would listen to her woes. “Even though the twins were dead, I still had to give birth as if they were alive.” Isabel felt a tug in her abdomen, an ache between her legs, and relief in her voice. “Mi Viejo, he couldn’t stop crying.”

Yoli took the last drag of her cigarette, eyebrows raised. “You sure you’re okay to be out here? I can do it by myself.” She reached down for the lantana. “If Caro was here, you wouldn’t even need me. You heard from her?”

Isabel shook her head and swallowed the lump in her throat. It had been several months since her second daughter, Carolina, had left home with the carnival worker. Every morning Isabel’s husband, Armando, lit a candle and prayed for her safety. Every night, the oldest, Julia, cried herself to sleep. Isabel listened for Caro’s return, regretted letting her go so easily, and hoped she’d been wrong about her daughter’s new life.

“Lucky flame,” Isabel read from the plastic tag. She’d ordered the bright orange and yellow flowers before she went to the hospital. Yoli’d been sprinkling them with water every other evening while Isabel was in bed last week. If she didn’t plant them today, they could die. And she didn’t trust Yoli to do it right. “We’re going to give you a new home preciosas,” she whispered into the pungent leaves.

Yoli snorted at Isabel’s cariños. She’d never understood how to love her plants.

“Aquí?” she asked, dangling the roots over the damp earth.

“Allá.” Isabel pointed a little more left with her big toe, its tip touched the cool soil.

Yoli dug more holes for the salvia.

“These two didn’t help at all. The other kids wanted to escape. All four girls and even Junior’s giant head – no problema. But these two wanted to live inside me forever. Ay no! At least they were small.” Jaime had been small too. Really small. Miss Julie said Isabel was lucky he could breathe on his own when he was born. Isabel took a cigarette from Yoli’s pack and puffed gently. “It has been too long since I enjoyed this.”

Yoli took it from her, inhaled deeply, and held in her smoke a little. “What’s next?”

“My summer jewel.” Isabel loosened the long velvety stems from their plastic shell. “Put these in the back row.” She imagined the bright red blooms scattered across the dull off-white stucco building. “Cuidado,” Isabel said before taking another short puff. “They’re fragile.”

“Are they even gonna live through summer? It’s supposed to be hotter than ever.”

“It’s always hotter than ever here.” Isabel closed her eyes and wished for a cool breeze, a gust of wind that didn’t reek of chemicals or manure. “I had to name them, you know. Mi Viejo tried to be strong, held my hand while the priest gave Joseph and Magdalena their sacraments.”

“He said you fainted.” Yoli took a drag from the cigarette, left it between her lips and reached for the last salvia plant. “He said the nurse thought you were having another baby.”

“Por tonta. She probably never had a baby. How would she know?” Isabel lowered her voice. “They took everything out. Said it wasn’t gonna work right anymore. Might as well.” She grabbed her belly flesh with both hands. “Maybe this panza will finally go away.” She reached up for another puff, but Yoli had finished the cigarette with one long drag. “At least I can’t get pregnant anymore. Thank God.” Isabel cursed herself when she saw Yoli’s lingering sadness.

When Isabel and Armando had first moved from Central California to this Imperial Valley neighborhood with the two older girls, Yoli was all celosa. “You’ll never be alone,” she’d said. Her sadness sat in the heat.

When Isabel had repeated what Yoli’d said, “I’ll never be alone,” it was with dread.  This wasn’t the life she’d imagined when she was younger. She wanted to travel but not to work fields in another dusty town. She had dreamed about places she’d only seen on the globe at school, wanted to learn new languages too.

“Closer to the edge.” Isabel pointed again with her other foot so Yoli didn’t put the last plants too close to the rest. The portulaca needed space to grow wide. Its thick needle leaves would fill the corner of the bed, a barrier protecting the more delicate blooms.

No one protected Isabel like that. Her delicate was gone when she had her first son at fourteen. Nine kids later, she could finally stop. Maybe be free. But it was too late for dreams. She only knew Spanish and English and hadn’t made a world wish in years.

“Should I water them all now?” Yoli stood, dusted the grains of soil off her knees, and twisted her back.

The foulness of her sweat made Isabel’s eyes water. She coughed. “Gracias, Yoli. I can manage the hose.” But first she lengthened her legs and put both feet flat on the earth. She closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the setting sun. “Palermo,” she said.

“Qué?”

“Barcelona.”

“What?”

“Casablanca.” Isabel opened her eyes wide and Yoli’s crotch was too close to her face. She leaned back and reached both hands up.

Yoli helped her stand.

“That’s all I can remember.” Isabel imagined her elementary classroom. Kids had screamed and chased each other with sticky hands. Someone’s milk had gone sour. She had spun the blue/brown metal ball, watched it with her head tilted sideways so the words were straight. She had ignored the chaos around her and waited for the globe to slow before she placed a fingertip on its bumpy surface, stopped the spinning with her destination choice. “Of all the places I wanted to visit, I can only remember those three names.” Names in Spanish. The others she couldn’t really pronounce. But she’d touched the raised black letters and spelled them to the smart kids nearby. A nice boy with green eyes and freckled nose had said the names for her. Isabel had repeated what she’d heard and smiled with gratitude. But that was all lost now.

“Who’d you be visiting?” Yoli asked and sat on Isabel’s yellow cushion. “Your family?”

“My family was swallowed by Texas. When I was a kid, I just wanted to go.” Isabel turned her back to Yoli and moved the trickle of water slowly over her plants. Wet and shiny and new. “Mira que bonitas,” she said to them. “In a few weeks, your beautiful blooms will make all the neighbors jealous.”

“Nobody just goes like that, Chavela.” Yoli got another cigarette.

“People do.”

“Not our people.” Yoli took a few short puffs. “What about Paris?”

“No!” Isabel’s voice is sharp, louder than she expected. So loud it hurt her gut and echoed across the circle. “No,” she repeated more quietly. “Never Paris.”

“Because you don’t know French?”

“Because there’s a Paris in Texas. We drove through there once.” That memory singed the innocence of her schoolgirl dreams. She closed her eyes and tried to keep her hot, dusty past from returning. She and Julia had left Texas with a man who promised California would be different. He was no different from her first husband. She held her lower abdomen, still pained from its recent loss. “I almost lost Carolina,” she whispered. The pop-pop of a passing car made her gasp and open her eyes wide.

“We could learn French,” Yoli said, oblivious to Isabel’s pain. “Maybe buy those tapes.”

“You could do that.” Isabel let the cool water splash speckles of soil onto her ankles.

Yoli passed the cigarette to Isabel. A crop duster flew over them, had dumped its toxins in a nearby field. They traded the cigarette back and forth until it was done.

“If you don’t need me anymore,” Yoli said, “I’m going home now. Maybe tomorrow we’ll travel.” Yoli flip-flopped on the asphalt, shuffled slowly back across the circle.

Isabel wiggled her toes in the edge of the mud, drizzled the cool water over them, and whispered to her plants, “Palermo, Barcelona, Casablanca.”

Photo by Rachael Warecki

Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera is an editor for Ricochet Editions and on the leadership team for Women Who Submit. She writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University and is working on her PhD at USC. www.tishareichle.com

The Genealogist

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By Richard Z. Santos

Lorenzo kept staring at the tiny fleck of dried cheese on the tine of his fork. He could picture the fork shoveling in one last bite of migas or stabbing an American-cheese covered potato cube. Then it was thrown into a dishwasher where the oily cheese held fast and dried to a solid. Since leaving San Antonio ten years ago he’d stopped eating food like that, but every time he came back home it oozed back into his veins.

This diner was old enough to morph from greasy spoon into local classic. It was his father’s favorite restaurant and the site of many reunion lunches. Oh, finally sixteen! Off to college already? What’d you graduate with? Moving to the east coast, why?

Lorenzo cursed himself for showing up on time.

Then, there he was. Alejandro spotted Lorenzo in a booth near the back and lifted his chin in recognition. A casual flick. ‘Sup. As if it hadn’t been a decade.

Lunch wasn’t Lorenzo’s idea. Best case scenario was a quick lunch livened by his fiancé, Alina, joining them for a slice of pie. Worst case was his father demonstrating that, after all these years, he was still the self-aggrandizing, narcissist who had driven away three wives and counting.

Neither he nor Alina had big families, a fact that Lorenzo loved. But Alina sought out distant cousins on Facebook and through ancestry sites. They were getting married in Washington, DC, but she’d wanted to invite Alejandro to the wedding. Lorenzo balked. “It’s been ten years. I don’t have anything to say to him.” He insisted he wasn’t mad at his father. She smiled and said, “Then try.”

They’d reach a compromise: lunch and then Alina would join for desert and they’d invite him together if the conversation went well.

Alejandro stopped to shake hands with slick guys in suits and gold watches—a fan club. Being a minor San Antonio literary celebrity meant you were always recognized in diners.

“Sorry, traffic.” Alejandro rolled his eyes. “They’ve been digging up all these streets, you know? Makes it hard to get around.”

Alejandro placed a book and a manila file folder on the vinyl tablecloth. Lorenzo pushed himself up on one leg for an awkward, not-quite-standing handshake. The orange carpet and laminate wood paneling of the diner hadn’t changed, but his father seemed older, more tired than last time.

“Friends of yours?” He nodded towards the other booth.

“Ah, just some old farts.” Alejandro waved them off. “They know the books.”

The waitress came back over. She had long, straight black hair and a Tejana’s round face. This look was so common in San Antonio, but Lorenzo never saw people like this in Washington, DC.

“You eat?” Alejandro pointed at Lorenzo.

“I’m still good with coffee for now, but you should get something.”

“Really? You used to be crazy about these biscuits.”

“I’ll get something later.”

His father raised his eyebrows at the waitress like he was ordering for a ten-year-old. “Just a coffee, I guess.”

Lorenzo pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and placed it in front of himself. He had forgotten to show the cheese fossil to the the waitress.

“You really, really used to devour these biscuits,” Alejandro repeated.

“Yeah? I don’t remember.”

“We used to come on the weekends because they know me here.” Alejandro made it sound like an old family tradition. “Anyway, how long you in town?” Alejandro asked.

I’m getting married—Lorenzo almost blurted it out, but they were still starting the conversation, warming up. 

“I head back next week.”

“I haven’t heard from you in a while, Renz.”

“I told you I was in town.”

“You emailed me yesterday.” His father smiled. “So, you seeing someone?”

“Sorry, I’ve been really busy. Things just sort of slip away.”

“Still in D.C., right?”

“Yeah, I like it there.”

“Too cold for me,” Alejandro said.

“All you need is a good jacket.”

He nodded as if Lorenzo had spoken a great truth. Alejandro pulled a soft-pack of cigarettes from his shirt’s breast pocket and set it next to his coffee cup. He tapped the pack of cigarettes with one finger.

The waitress returned with coffee. Alejandro made a point of reading her name tag and slowly speaking her name out loud—Mónica.

“Mónica, you remember me, right? I was here this morning. For breakfast?”

She grinned pleasantly enough but didn’t respond.

“Did you maybe find a lighter in that booth over there? The booth with those, well, very dark-pigmented people?”

Alejandro pointed across the diner to a black couple. Lorenzo’s mouth dropped open and the waitress quickly raised her eyebrows.

“Uh, no,” she managed to say. “No, I don’t think so.”

“My lighter must have slipped out of my pocket this morning. Could you go ask if they found it? Maybe put it in their pocket? It’s green, plastic.”

“I didn’t find a lighter.”

“Could you ask, though? Green, plastic. You were my waitress, remember? I left a tip.”

Lorenzo spoke up. “She’ll keep her eye out for it, I bet.”

“Well,” Alejandro said. “It couldn’t be anywhere else, and Mónica appears to have the time.”

Lorenzo worried the white, cracked handle of his mug, trying to avoid the waitress’s glare. Dark pigmented people made them sound diseased. Maybe his father was trying to be funny. His books had all fought against historical racism and the white myths of Texas. She’d walk away, and Alejandro would say he was testing her, proving that people are complicit in everyday racism.

Mónica shifted her weight, slowly spun around on one foot and approached the couple. They glanced up from their food, squeezed their eyebrows together and shook their heads. Mónica turned and walked into the kitchen without a glance at their table.

Alejandro smirked like they had been flirting.

“Well, I bet they have it. It just couldn’t be anywhere else. She’s pretty though, nice brown eyes. You should take her out. I’m sure you could, a waitress?”

“Why’d you say that?” Lorenzo asked.

“You should ask for her number.”

“About that couple, why’d you say that?”

Alejandro picked up his pack of cigarettes and then put them back down.

“What do you mean, Renz?” He sounded as if Lorenzo’s question was the offensive part.

“You called them ‘dark.’”

“Yeah, well.” He lowered his voice and shrugged his shoulders. “Aren’t they?”

“You can’t say that, Dad.”

The word slipped out, he wouldn’t say it again, but it was too late. Dad. It stood on the table, bright, shining and familial, impossible to ignore. Alejandro smiled, pleased. 

Lorenzo was flustered. “You’re dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned.”

“Oh, who knows what words to use.” Alejandro sipped his coffee and glanced over at his fan club booth. “It was a good lighter. You don’t smoke, do you?”

“Sorry,” Lorenzo said.

“It’s a nasty habit,” Alejandro agreed.

Lorenzo sipped his coffee, which tasted like burnt popcorn. As a teenager, Lorenzo had become angry. He blamed his father for the divorce, he resented him for staying away, and he hated him for not helping with child support. Still, for years, Lorenzo would pick up the phone when his father called and make plans to meet him here. His father wrote books, told great stories, and seemed to know everyone. It had impressed Lorenzo long ago.

Mónica came back out of the kitchen but avoided their table. Couldn’t blame her. What would Alina think of him?

His father took a sip of water then smiled. It was the kind of smile Lorenzo used to think was meant for him but was actually meant for whatever story he was about to tell.

“I have exciting news for you, Renz. I’ve done a lot more research into the family since I’ve seen you.” Alejandro pulled the manila file folder and book in front of him. “So, get ready for this. One of your great-great grandmothers, Angelita Villa, remember that name?”

Lorenzo shook his head. He wasn’t ready to move past the racist comment, but his father had already forgotten the moment.

“Well,” his father continued, “she married a man who died shortly after their only son was born. Their child was my grandfather, your great-grandfather who you never met, but who I’ve told you about.”

“Right.” Lorenzo looked to the door for Alina.

“Now, I just found out that Angelita Villa re-married, in 1900, to a man named Santiago Jimenez. The wedding was downtown, here, at San Fernando Cathedral. I did some research into Santiago. His father was named Francisco Jimenez, and Francisco’s father was Damacio Jimenez.”

Alejandro’s eyebrows shot up and carved deep folds into his forehead. This brought out the wrinkles around his eyes. It was supposed to be a smile, but his skin looked loose and creviced like an old leather jacket. Lorenzo rubbed his own cheek, hoping not to feel the same meaty flesh.

“Okay.”

“You don’t remember the name Damacio Jimenez?” Alejandro asked.

“No.”

“Damacio was one of the Tejanos who died defending the Alamo. You get it?” His father leaned forward and ticked out his fingers one by one. “Your great-great-great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.”

Alejandro opened the book he’d brought and thrust it forward. An old diner receipt had been used to mark the page, and it fluttered onto Lorenzo’s lap. The page showed an etching of a tall, young man with almond eyes, black, curly hair and an unruffled, blue military tunic. The man was stoically, nearly impassively, pointing a sword in front of him, legs braced, as the Mexican army swarmed over the walls. Corpses lay at his feet. The Mexican soldiers were crude, swarthy stereotypes, but Damacio was light-skinned and regal. Behind him was the familiar curved-m of the Alamo.

“You’re related,” Alejandro said.

Lorenzo placed the book on the table and then lifted his cup. “Not by blood.”

“Well, yes, Damacio’s son married into the family.” Alejandro’s finger tapped the picture.  “But he fought at the Alamo.”

“You hate the Alamo,” Lorenzo said.

“In middle school we watched a documentary you were in,” Lorenzo said. “You said the white settlers were lunatics, terrorists.”

The documentary had shown Alejandro stalking in front of the Alamo. “People treat these rebels like they were saints,” Alejandro had said. “But they were racist, illiterates. Their delusional, modern-day defenders worship a history they don’t understand. The myths aren’t real.”

“I was a kid,” Lorenzo continued. “It embarrassed the hell out of me, but my teacher said you were telling the real truth, doing something that would be remembered. He said that in front of the whole class.”

In that one moment, sitting in history class, Lorenzo had felt love, or at least respect, for his father. For a few years, that memory served as forgiveness for his father’s absence. Rewriting history took time, effort, and no one, not even Lorenzo, could expect Alejandro to also have time to be a father.

Alejandro kept his hand on the open book. Lorenzo could tell he didn’t understand—that story sounded like one more fan letter.

The waitress returned. “Ready to eat?”

“No, we’re leaving, can we pay now?”Alejandrothrust five dollars into her hand and waved her away.

“We’re leaving?” Lorenzo asked. Alina was supposed to be there in five minutes. She’d be on time.

Alejandro opened the folder, pulled out thick paper and placed them on top of the book with an almost-religious care. It was a handwritten family tree.

“This is for you. It includes Damacio. His name is on the Alamo monument. We can see it, right now, then go into the cathedral where Angelita was married.”

The family tree in front of Lorenzo showed a clean and orderly line from himself back through the years to Damacio. One name bracketed between two other names, bracketed between two more. A thin line leaving out everyone who didn’t fit this narrative. Alejandro’shandwriting was lurid, near-calligraphy. The first sheet held Lorenzo’s name and a blank line for his future wife.

Perhaps because of that particular, unseen connection between lovers, he raised his eyes to the window just as Alina pulled into the parking lot.

Part of the reason Alina wanted to meet his father so badly was that she didn’t have old family stories. Lorenzo appreciated her freedom, her lightness. She couldn’t meet his father. She’d be charmed by Alejandro’s knack for making the most everyday occurrence sound momentous because it happened long ago. Lorenzo imagined Alina’s name next to his own and in front of Alejandro’s on the family tree. Her name would be so Russian and angular next to their ancient, palatial Spanish names. She’d be buried by waves of ancestors swarming towards them; their children would be buried—bound to a past long gone and listening to Alejandro’s useless tales.

“You’ve spent your life saying the Alamo defenders weren’t heroes,” Lorenzo said.

“Sure, I still believe all that. But this is impressive.” Alejandro placed the family tree back into the folder and handed it to Lorenzo. He picked up the book and looked at Damacio, his eyes sparking. “It’s history. I don’t excuse it, but these people were doing what they thought they needed to do.”

The waitress brought their change and cleared their cups, leaving the table bare.

“What do you say, Renz?”

Lorenzo placed the folder on the table in front of him. He wouldn’t go anywhere with him and he wouldn’t introduce Alejandro to his fiancé. Maybe, Lorenzo supposed, he was supposed to have witnessed or intervened in his father’s slow slide into racism and the shedding off of his ideals—the only thing Alejandro ever had. Maybe sons were supposed to go through this. But his father had set this pattern twenty years earlier, and now Lorenzo could see his father with too much clarity.

“Go ahead,” Lorenzo said. “I’ll meet you at the Alamo. I have a conference call. A work thing. It’ll just take an hour.”

“You sure? I can wait here while you’re on the call.”

Alina walked into the restaurant, and Lorenzo slid over in the booth so she couldn’t see him behind his father.

“No, no, go ahead. I’ll see you in front of the Alamo. An hour tops. Thanks for the family tree. I do think it’s interesting.”

Lorenzo’s voice was flat and toneless—it sounded heavy in his ears. Alina would have been hurt by his indifference, but Alejandro didn’t recognize it.

“Okay,” Alejandro said. “Maybe after we can go by the Sons and Daughters of the Alamo headquarters. I’m trying to get them to add us to the official list of descendants.”

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

Alejandro slid out of the booth and stood next to the table. “I’ll see you soon. I still want to hear more about what’s going on with you.”

He lingered, Lorenzo remained seated and shook his hand. When Alejandro passed Alina, he turned back and glanced at her appreciatively. Her blonde hair was cut short and boyish, above her ears. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, and her blue eyes were spaced far apart. She didn’t look like the waitress, or anyone else in San Antonio. Alina didn’t seem to notice Alejandro—he was just another paunchy, balding guy with dark skin.

She leaned down and kissed Lorenzo on the mouth, slow and deep. While she sat down across from him, Lorenzo put the genealogy folder on the booth next to him.

Alina noticed his movement. “What’s all that?”

“Nothing. Papers someone left. I’ll leave it just in case they come back.”

“Where’s your father?” she asked.

“How was traffic?”

“Fine, I guess.” She looked around, excited. “So?”

“I told you this was a bad idea.”

She looked pained. “What happened?”

“It’s okay. Really. He was here, but he had to go. Something about leaving town for a book he’s writing.” Lorenzo waved Mónica back over. “I’m starving, you want some food?”

She reached over and placed her hand on his wrist.

“You’re not telling me something,” she said. “Did you have a fight?”

With his other hand, Lorenzo stuffed the folder between the cushion and the back of the booth for some other son of San Antonio to find. He lifted both hands into the air, slipping her off, and spread them in front of him. An old credit-card receipt with his father’s name on it remained, unnoticed on Lorenzo’s lap.

“What do you want to do today?” he asked. “We are completely free.”

Photo by Casey Schlickeisen

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin. His debut novel, Trust Me, was published by Arté Publico Press in March 2020. He is a Board Member of The National Book Critics Circle and served as one of the 2019 Nonfiction Judges for The Kirkus Prize. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and many more. In a previous career he worked for some of the nation’s top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions. Follow him on Twitter @richardzsantos or visit his website at www.richardzsantos.com.

El Bronco, Durango

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By Miguel Soto

Between a scorpion’s stinger of glass and a severed lizard’s tail of topaz, sunset unearths a bridge of bone and a bullet’s shell. My father sets camp alongside a mound of clay. He points to the spine and says: restos de un hombre que nunca trabajó entre tierra que nunca sembró. Dicen que era gay. Mosaic on a desert altar of repose. My father sits closest to the fire as I eat stones behind him, weighing the ghost in my throat. From the fire, an obsidian sculpture chews and spits my silhouette, like a sentence asserting each syllable. Ghost in my throat, or recurring refrain of susurrate grief, thank you for not having a shadow to interrogate, even as sunrise rifts through el campo aridó. Light, bringer of work, may you unearth the song my bones will pronounce amongst the stone.

Miguel Soto serves as the Book Review Editor and Website Consultant for Jet Fuel Review, an international literary journal housed in Lewis University. In the summer of 2019, he was the recipient of the Wolny Writing Residency. His writings can be found in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, 30 N, The Ekphrastic Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. You can find more from him at www.miguelasoto.com

8309517

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By Olivia Peña

Manuel Reyes is a winner every day. He sits in front of the communal TV to watch the seven o’clock news—a static mess of black and white; anchors with their polished smiles delivering even more bad news. Beneath their crisp ironed suits, the lottery numbers for that week’s drawing. He stares at the ticket crumpled between his paint stained fingers. His wife’s suggestion, all those years ago, had been baby oil to remove the colors from in between his hairy knuckles. But he liked to peel away at the splattered mess, nerves pulsing through his chest, as the winning lottery numbers scrolled lazily across the screen. He plays the same numbers every week. 8 and 30 for his ex-wife’s birthday. 9 5 1 for Riverside—the only aspect of his life left unscathed after the divorce. And the Mega Million number enclosed in a white circle (with the power to change his life), always the number seven—his daughter’s favorite number, he hoped, unsure if she even still had favorites. The last number she mentioned was 40, $40,000, which she explained with a sigh, her new job was paying her. “I have a degree for fucks sake,” she said. Manuel sighed with her, blew air into the receiver of his pre-paid metro phone. “You deserve much more, mijita,” he said, even though it was more money than he would ever see again in his lifetime.

Every day, Manuel imagines all that he will buy with whatever amount he wins. 80 million this week, advertised in red fluorescent numbers, hanging from the window of every liquor store and Vons from the shelter to Hole Avenue. 50 million after taxes. Or maybe 30 million—Manuel was never good at calculations. His ex-wife had set up all work and finances for him. Found houses that needed color, deciphered what was fair to pay, and paid whichever partners he needed for the job their cut. She was always carrying the burden for them both.

Manuel settled on 40 million. 39 million would go to his daughter, Amelia. So much cash, she could quit her job, throw away her long pencil skirt, pull her thick curly hair out of that tight bun, become whatever it was she really wanted to be. 1 Million For himself. Manuel Reyes— millionaire. First, he would buy a modest trailer at the park beneath the 91. He didn’t need anything extravagant. Anything was better than the itchy cots of the SDA shelter on La Sierra, or the shelter downtown, where he had to sleep with his stuff under his back, and even then, he would wake up with pieces of himself missing.

Next, he would buy A 1997 Honda CRV like the one he had when Amelia was little. The one he would drive to Dodger Stadium, park, and eat cinnamon rolls out of the trunk before a game. Amelia with frosting all over her blue and white vest. And finally—second-hand furniture. A rightful place to put all of his things—a nightstand to keep his medication that he now had to haul around the sun stained streets in a plastic bag, waiting for 3PM when the shelter doors opened.

Manuel didn’t win last night’s drawing, and blames the liquor store for his misfortune. The man in the crisp suit mentioned, as Manuel crumpled the ticket in his hand, that there had been a shooting shortly after Manuel left. A father, critical condition, Manuel’s age, and while he should have been thinking, that could have been me, instead, he shouted “lousy”, drowned out by the noise in the shelter, and threw the ticket to the ground. So he tries a new liquor store, for good measure, in the morning. The sun is overbearing, the heat is lazy and settled around every isle of the liquor store. The clerk doesn’t understand how he pronounces Super Lotto. Manuel makes the money signal, his fingers dry and crisp. The clerk understands. Manuel has five dollars left in his wallet, so he looks at the endless rows of rolled up scratchers.

“Power Shot Multiplier. Win up to $100,000!”

Half of Amelia’s salary, he thinks, tapping his fingers on the glass. “Siete,” he says to the clerk, who repeats “seven” aloud in perfect English.

Outside, a woman walks by with a clear bag of pastel pan dulce, a baby on her hip, and a pocket full of coins, surely in route to Lavanderia Magnolia. Paletero men stroll lazily in search of a few kids cutting class, hungry for cartooned paletas in the heat of the morning. Manuel uses his fingernails to scratch the surface of the Power Shot scratcher. First, he sees $15 x2 and he is a lucky man. Thirty dollars could buy him pupusas and platanos fritos at Reinas. $50 x14 and he’s staying in a hotel tonight. Forget platanos, he wants a burger with double meat, medium rare, because now he has options. $500 x2, and the street starts to spin. Cars are zipping by without a sound, and the heat is making him dizzy. The woman with the pan dulce is a blur of pink and brown, the son on her hip is a shadow. $1,000 x18 and he’s calling Amelia. Punching numbers into his flip phone. His hands are shaking as he tells her $20,000, at least $20,000. “I can’t bring it with me to the shelter,” he says, and she understands. Unlike her speeches via early morning phone calls. Her relentless offers of her apartment, offering her pullout mattress couch to him. “That’s your problem, you have too much pride,” he hears Amelia or his ex-wife saying. He doesn’t have to explain that he cannot bring the ticket home, wherever that may be tonight. “Meet me at work,” she says, and Manuel tucks the ticket deep into his pocket.

The walk to Amelia’s job makes Manuel’s skin melt and his bones ache and pop. When he gets halfway there, he has to sit down on a bus bench and watch as busses drive by and push hot exhaust into his face. When he arrives in the parking lot of the tinted office building he sits on the curb, scratching the bar code for Amelia. From the revolving door, she is beautiful, and even more so up-close, just like her mother.

Before she sits down, he tells her his plans for the money. For her to keep half for herself and to give half to her mom. “Ten grand a piece or whatever after taxes. Mira,” he says, pointing to the x18 and x14. She slings her bony arm around his damp shoulder and asks why he’s so hot. “No air condition on the bus,” he says, shaking the ticket towards Amelia. She holds the ticket in between her manicured fingers and pulls a quarter out of her pocket, scratching the winning numbers section. In the right hand column, there are no moneybags or rolls of dollar bills, no Powershot written in bold, glittered letters—just numbers.

“You forgot to scratch this, Pa. You didn’t win. You forgot to scratch this section to see if you got one of these. See,” she says pointing to the moneybags on the side of the scratcher. Her voice is all pity and no excitement. Heat spreads through Manuel’s stomach and rises until his entire body is ablaze. The same embarrassment he imagines he would feel, body slung across Amelia’s pullout couch, is a fire under his skin.

There is no liquor store downtown. No red lotto numbers gleaming, carrying the broken hymns of men in Riverside with everything to lose. Down a few blocks and to the right is a fancy corner store, though. With a bright yellow neon sign that reads “wine, cheese, and deli sandwiches” hanging from the front window. There, Amelia pulls out a crisp twenty and asks for two of the same ticket. “Eight,” she says, in perfect English, pointing under the glass. Manuel chimes in, hands in pockets. “Y un Super Lotto tambien, por favor.”

“Super Lotto too, please,” Amelia says, handing over the cash.

They find a nearly empty park, save for a pigtailed girl swinging alone. Her Nanny is sitting, hunched, on the bench nearby, with eyes glued to her phone. Manuel barely recognizes the park at first, because it is immaculate—fresh, bright red bark soft beneath their feet, swings and monkey bars that glitter in the sun. The Super Lotto ticket looks out of place on the newly painted cherry wood bench, 8 3 0 9 5 1 -7 staring up at Manuel. The park, and Amelia, so much different than they were before. Manuel remembers days he used to spend there, pushing Amelia in the same rusted swings with her mom sitting on the same bench, yelling, “too high, too high, she’s almost to the sky!” Their laughter, together, a chorus when life was simple. He thinks of telling Amelia about the numbers. He could start there. And in between every squeak of the swing, he could say every apology that ever crossed his mind. First, “I’m sorry you had to miss work for this.” Then, “I’m sorry you have to worry about me.” Or maybe, “I am sorry I can’t be an example,” which he thinks sounds completely different translated in his head.

“Power Shot Multiplier. Win up to $100,000!”

Amelia scratches the ticket in her lap, brushing the black dust from her perfectly ironed slacks. The girl on the swing is laughing, swinging her legs to and from the sky to go higher. “Nothing,” Amelia says, turning the ticket over. She puts her head on Manuel’s shoulder, looking down at the ticket he’s already begun to scratch. The sun feels dull and calm on Manuel’s face, and there’s even a small breeze. He wants to stay in the park forever. But, instead, he keeps scratching, iridescent dust collecting under his paint stained fingers. Amelia, for once, stays longer than usual. And Manuel continues, and knows he will keep playing, over and over again until he is a winner.

Olivia Peña (@oliviapenya) is a Black-Salvadoran writer and storyteller from San Francisco. She earned her MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her writing has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop and her work has appeared in The Acentos Review. 

Tortilla Flat

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By Sarah G. Huerta

Danny dies at the end.
I average out to reading about
one Steinbeck novel
per year. The year I attempted
suicide, I picked my way
through his first success
after waking on my way home,
making use of my life
after its two-day pause.
Back home, I picked up
the kaleidoscope of pills
scattered on my bathroom floor,
stoic while sweeping and tearing
up the note scribbled
in gold gel pen. The ghost
of the tally marks
marking the number
I swallowed
lingered on my arm.

The year after I attempted
suicide, I struggled through
my textbook for Chicano lit,
taking in all the out-of-print
pages had to offer. I found
Steinbeck’s Danny under
scrutiny – a Mexican turned
insane by lack of meaning.
I found meaning after
we died. I lived
to find him dead. Bipolar
and bilingual as I am,
I’m glad I didn’t die
a cliche, like Danny.

Sarah G. Huerta is a Chicana poet from Dallas. They will begin their MFA at Texas State University in the fall. They currently live in Texas with their cat, Lorca.

Islands

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By Elizabeth Gonzalez James

She was watching an old rerun of Three’s Company when the power went out. The television snapped off with a slight fizz, and John Ritter’s smiling face greened in the electric afterglow before fading to black. The ceiling fan above the living room slowed and stopped. The air conditioner cut off and its rattle echoed through the ductwork like an old, stuttering car going around a bend. She pushed buttons on the remote, jiggled cords, flipped switches, raised and lowered the little plastic lever on the thermostat in the fantasy that she could bring the AC back, that she held any dominion over the circumstances in her parents’ house. 

She poured the last of a pitcher of blue Flavor Aid into a plastic cup and drank it in the dim kitchen. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning. Her parents’ shared Buick wouldn’t screech its way onto the cul-de-sac for seven hours. Already her forehead sheened and the skin below her small breasts was humid under the drape of an oversized shirt. South Texas summer seeped around the aluminum frame windows, stole through the places where the walls were coming apart from the ceilings, surfaced through the carpeted floor, leeched down through the asphalt roof tiles, and filled the still space of the house unacknowledged but threatening, like pretending not to see a man holding a gun.         

Seven hours. The words darkened long shadows over her like a prison sentence. She dropped the cup in the sink and opened the refrigerator again, sifted through the cans and packets in the pantry. Once and only once she had discovered a half-eaten bag of gummi bears thrown in with the spices, and she liked to imagine it had been left there by a traveler from another time, a little gift just for her, a magic hand reaching through the void to show her that magic was real, and that she was not alone. She believed that if she peered hard enough into the space between the cans of tomato sauce and the plastic tub that held the french fry oil, she could discover worlds, things unseen, delights beyond reckoning. But today she saw only the stippled surface of the pantry wall, an archipelago emerging out of choppy waters, and nothing more. 

The coffee can where her parents kept their spare change sat on top of the refrigerator. When she emptied it onto the kitchen table she was disappointed to discover it had already been gleaned of its quarters and dimes. One dollar and twenty-seven cents. A Dr. Pepper and a Blow Pop. Maybe two. She squinted through the window at a thermometer hanging off the worn wooden fence: ninety-seven degrees. And Circle K was at least a mile up the road. 

She slipped on one of the training bras her mother had forced on her the previous summer, before she started sixth grade. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by the bras or by her lack of breasts, but it was the way her mother looked at her whenever she mentioned things like bras and tampons and birth control pills—with a raised eyebrow and a gravid smile like she was getting initiated into some great society. Even at eleven she was smart enough to know that any community built on shared genitalia was going to be thinly allied at best. 

The sun was blinding white outside, like the phosphorus her science teacher had burned once in a demonstration of reactivity. She felt that her skin might spontaneously ignite, too. Her brown hair clung to the back of her neck and she brought it up and down off her damp skin in a meek attempt at fanning herself. Her bike had had a flat tire for months and no one knew where the needle for the pump had rolled away to. She rode the bike down the driveway anyway but only made it past her neighbor’s mailbox when she jumped down and gave up. By the time she got the bike back in the garage she saw red splotches in front of her eyes and her forearms tingled with burn. She looked back at the front door, but she already knew the shape the day would take in there.

She put the zippered wallet with one dollar and twenty-seven cents in her back pocket and turned left to leave the cul-de-sac. She felt like a character in a choose-your-story novel. If you go to the store turn to page 42. If you stay at home turn to page 9. She imagined herself splitting from herself, one version turning left while the other went back in the house and drifted listless as a hot ghost from room to room. She’d always used scraps of paper to keep track of her place in those books so she could read through each storyline, know every possibility contained at the end of each forking path. It was thrilling to imagine how many outcomes could be contained within a life, but also unnerving, the difference between commanding a space fleet and dying in the stomach of an alien hinging on no more than the turn of a page.  

She wished she’d brought a hat. Sunglasses. A paper fan. Her family had only lived in Corpus Christi a year, in this neighborhood of dead end streets beaded like grapes off arterial stems. A hot wind drove down the street and blew her hair straight back and she closed her eyes to pretend for a second she was at the beach, that it was ocean waves she could hear instead of the distant whoosh of traffic on the highway. The cul-de-sacs were like islands she thought, each one ending abruptly on a vast and fallow cotton field, little teardrops of civilization marooned inside neat brown flows of dirt spilling to the horizon. And the neighborhood of cul-de-sacs was itself an island, floating far down from the main road. Driving to the mall the Buick always sailed past miles of identical fields containing identical dollops of neighborhoods, a pattern that seemed to repeat no matter the magnification, zoomed in or out.  

She had a brief fright wondering if somewhere not far away there was an identical neighborhood where an identically sweaty middle schooler walked to an identical Circle K to buy an identically foolish lunch. She’d meet the other girl along the road. The other girl would ask her where she was headed. They’d walk together. The other girl would be cagy with details—her name, address, parents’ occupations—but she’d be so deft at changing the subject, so flattering and interesting, that by the time they’d arrive at the store and select their drinks they’d be best friends. Then they’d walk back the same way they’d come. At the turnoff to the correct cul-de-sac, the fifth on the right, the other girl would stop and say something like, Well I’ve got to go home now. See you later. And the two girls would discover they were both heading for the same house. They would fight—My house! No, mine!—and the other girl would push her to the ground and run inside and emerge with her parents who would stare at her unknowing, asking Sweetheart, where do you live? And then the story would be over, the other girl having succeeded in unseating the original and stealing her home, her parents, her life. But where would the original girl go? 

She loved stories that had a delicious strangeness, like lying in bed and seeing an eerie blue light outside your window, but knowing you could call your parents at any moment to come see what it was. But most stories always ended before she knew for a fact what would happen next. She could guess, but she felt it was so much better to know. If she ever wrote a story she decided she would tell the reader exactly what happened: 

After losing her home and her parents the original girl would wander the cul-de-sacs for the rest of the night, making absolutely sure she hadn’t gone to the wrong house. She’d doze a few hours on a pile of cardboard out back of H-E-B and in the morning take a bus downtown to the bayfront. She’d beg change from tourists and at nightfall would sneak onto a shrimp boat. She’d live like this for years, vessel to vessel, shrimping and fishing, catching tarpon and black drum, but one night a storm would overtake her boat, and her last thought before she sank beneath the waves would be a question: Would the other girl die at the same instant, the two of them symbiotically linked, two ends of one string?

One, two, three, four—red vinyl yard signs dotted the road, BUSH COUNTRY ‘94 declared in tall white letters like church steeples. This was a neighborhood that loved signs and sigils, banners proclaiming Spring, another SuperBowl win for the Cowboys, a daughter on the JV cheerleading squad, love of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, mini billboards advertising the dearest identities uniting the people inside all the identical brick houses. Corpus Christi, body of Christ. Something about living in or on Christ’s body made people wish to declare themselves. It still surprised her how the names on the big vinyl signs had changed since they’d left Zapata and moved east. Lopez was now Wheatley, Salinas was Kocurek, Ortega was Diffenbach. And the girl found that she had changed in the move, too. With blue eyes and freckles she’d been called a white girl in Zapata. But with a father born on the southern bank of the Río Grande, and a last name originating in Andalusia six hundred years prior, the girl was informed by her new classmates that she was Mexican. Something they had too much of already, said a boy with small eyes and a cruel little mouth like a plastic elf. She’d rolled her eyes and told the boy to shut up but she worried ever since that whether she was white or Mexican would always be up for public debate, subject to the shifting breeze of popular opinion. But as she didn’t know the answer herself, she felt she couldn’t really complain. 

Dogs periodically gambolled down driveways to bark or sniff her ankles, but she saw no one else. The air was thick with humidity. Like breathing through a wet washcloth, she heard her mother say once. Cicadas trilled overhead, interspersed with mourning dove coos that sounded to the girl like mothers calling their children back home. Sweat ran into her eyes and rained down her cheeks like tears. Imagined water pooled in street corner mirages and she could taste the bubblesweet joy of a Dr. Pepper on her tongue. But every time she looked up the Circle K sign was still so far away, like the wind was blowing her back towards home, like the space between her neighborhood and the main road was expanding, like she and the sign were two rafts on a deep sea circling, circling, never getting nearer. 

She passed a brick house with sour green trim and tried to peer into the windows, but all the blinds were sealed tight against the day. The girl who lived there wore real gold hoops and let her welita braid her brilliant black hair in the mornings before school. She’d sat with the braided girl on the school bus and the two had shared Pop Tarts and divulged which eighth graders they thought were cute. They went to the skating rink and sucked blue jawbreakers that stained their lips and teeth. They passed notes in the hallway and waited for each other at their lockers before lunch. Then the braided girl went to visit cousins in the Valley over spring break and came back in overalls, purple lipstick, and one wisp of hair curled and shellacked to her cheek like a jetty. I don’t do that baby shit no more, the braided girl said loudly one afternoon at lunch. Why don’t you ask some fifth graders to go roller skating with you? The braided girl hadn’t said, White bitch, perhaps hadn’t even thought it, but the girl heard it now bellying in the soupy air, a sustained bass note that drowned out the cicadas. She imagined the braided girl sitting on the floor of her bedroom watching cable and eating cookies and painting her toenails with glittering polish and the thought made her pick up a rock and hurl it toward the front door. She took off running down the street before anyone could answer.     

The sun was lower. It hung directly behind the Circle K sign so that she could no longer see the logo, only the suggestion of white and red against a blinding orange halo. If the original girl drowned, she thought, then the other girl would certainly die too. Their lives depended on one another, as though they were each made of two disparate halves that couldn’t survive without the other. Maybe the girls wouldn’t fight over the house. Maybe they would find a way to share the same life, taking turns, one sleeping in the bed while the other hid out in the backyard. A mysterious twin would really be the greatest thing that could happen to a person, she thought. Someone who shared your whole life, your every thought, who knew you down to your DNA. If she saw her twin standing down at the end of the street she’d run to meet her, she’d shower her with attention, bring her back to her house and give her first dibs in the closet every morning. Two ends of one string only meant the string might be tied to something.   

The sun was still dropping, the day swelling into a hot, windless night. The sky was a lustrous swirl of orange and purple, red and blue. Street lights buzzed awake. Her mouth was gummy with thirst and there was a burning, gnawing feeling seeping up her stomach into her breastbone. Still she was no closer to the store. The sign shone in the darkening sky like the North Star. She thought about going back, that her parents must already be home, that they must have gone down to the power company and paid the bill and that the air conditioner was at that moment slowly filling the house with frigid offering. But she didn’t turn around. She kept walking with limp hair plastered to her forehead and neck. The night unrolled shapeless before her in a million directions.  

She could see someone in the shadows coming toward her, heard their sneaker feet crushing dead cottonwood leaves. No cars came and went out of the driveways, but inside the houses televisions clicked on, wan blue light spilling from behind every blinded window. A skittering breeze turned into a great gust that shook the proud vinyl signs, flattening their words to the ground. But they straightened a second later as the gust continued east and away, and the cul-de-sacs were quiet again save the white words screaming from the signs and a trace of canned laughter echoing out of the blue screens like tropical birds high in their island trees. She thought it was beautiful to imagine living in the body of Christ. And didn’t that mean deliverance was always there, wanting her to grab it? 

The person was paused on a corner, waiting. She couldn’t see their face. They were only an interruption to the darkness, black upon darker black. If you keep walking, turn to page 77. If you turn around, go to page 8. She pushed her hair off her forehead, licked her dry lips, and jogged down the street, eager to catch them.    

Before becoming a writer Elizabeth Gonzalez James was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Ploughshares Blog, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut novel, Mona at Sea, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, Summer 2021. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.