Category: Stories

A Home for Socrates (from “The Riotous Walls”)

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(From The Riotous Walls, unpublished short novel)

Socrates the goldfish needed a new home.  He had been living in an ice cream bucket for the last year and it was high time for him to have a nice home that he could see out of like other goldfish.  But what?  The glass fish aquariums at Wal-Mart cost $10.99 on which I could eat for a week and, in fact, unless I came up with a better idea, he wasn’t going to get a look at the wide world until Christmas.

Suddenly I spied the wine jug we emptied  on Saturday night.  It was perfect:  big enough, transparent and it was free.  The bottleneck presented the only problem and it would have to be removed by what means I wasn’t sure, but where there’s a will there’s a way.   I scoured the house and came up with a Neanderthal  repertoire of tools:  sticks, rocks, a hammer.

I was trying to knock just the top part of it off with a hammer when Troy came out of the downstairs apartment to see what the hell all the noise was about.  I didn’t think it seemed like such a bad idea until I started trying to explain it.  I mean, maybe I would be lucky enough to break just the top of it off without bashing the thing to shards and slitting my wrists. You don’t know until you try.

I have something you could use, he offered.
Really?
Yeah. It used to be my hamster cage, but he died.  So you could have it.  It’s plastic, but it’d hold water.
Oh. Cool.
What was I thinking, anyway?
That way you won’t cut yourself, he added and went inside to get it.

Talk about nice neighbors.  Troy wasn’t the world’s smartest guy; after all, he works at the rubber factory.  But he had me and my half-baked college degree on that one.

New Moon Dreams

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She is not afraid by the sea in the house with no windows or doors.
The enormous blackness outside pours in like water through open spaces.
She can feel the faint breath of stars on her skin.
The rising tide rocks her in her bed and frogs sing her songs in the language of secrets.

Time evaporates like mist and she has been here forever; a thousand years by the ancient sea, asleep between sand and stars.
She will never leave.
She will always be here where her body lies sleeping in the warm black night, salt in her hair, a girl/animal curled in new moon dreams.

Short Hair Like Boys (from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder”)

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(from When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder, release date: August 19, 2014 by eLectio Publsihing.)

*****

Mommy washes our hair on Saturdays so it will be clean for church.  Me and Wanda have long hair and Mommy has to wash it because we can’t.

I don’t like it when Mommy washes my hair.  Sometimes I cry.  She washes me with pink soap in the bathtub and then I have to turn around so the water is coming out behind me.  The water is coming out and she pushes me over backwards until my hair is under the spigot and my hair gets heavy and my head feels like it’s going to fall off.  Then I can sit up and Mommy puts shampoo on my head.  She scratches it all around with her fingers.  She does it hard and it hurts.  I ask Mommy does she have to do it with her fingernails? She says Oh Honey I’m Not Using My Fingernails, I Just Use My Fingers.  Then she doesn’t scratch quite as hard anymore until next time.

When it’s time to rinse the shampoo out she makes me put my head back under the water again.  I get to put a washcloth over my eyes so shampoo doesn’t get in them.  Water is splashing all over my face and my nose tickles and I can’t see and I can’t breathe.  Mommy rubs out the shampoo and I have to hold my head up and I can’t hold it up anymore.  But if I sit up I get in trouble and if I put my head back the whole way all the water goes in my nose and mouth.  I wish we could have short hair like boys but the Bible says we can’t. It’s not fair but we have to obey it.

After bath, Daddy combs us.  Daddy always says our hair is pretty and it smells good like shampoo.  He says I Smell ‘Poo for shampoo and we laugh because we aren’t allowed to say that word.  Daddy can say it though when he means shampoo.  If Mommy hears him say it she says Lamar and looks at him out of the top of her eyes.

In the summer Daddy takes the blue comb and sits on the porch and combs out the tangles.  I wear my Noah’s Ark jammies.  We listen to the peepers and Daddy tells me about animals like peepers that are really little frogs and about fish that live in the pond and bumblebees that live in nests and worms that live in the dirt.  He tells me stories about when he was a little boy.  In the winter we can’t sit outside, we have to sit inside and me and Daddy watch Hee Haw on tv while he combs me.  People on that program talk funny and they walk around in the cornfield and Miss Minnie forgot to take the tag off her hat.  Mommy doesn’t like Hee Haw and she doesn’t like Daddy to watch it, or us.  She says it’s too dumb and she tries to wash our hair during it so we can’t watch.

The Same Boots

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The headline says, “Nicaraguense Muere Atropellado” but they don’t give a name or show a face. There are policemen in the photo, a dented car, a man’s legs on the ground, cut off by the photo frame. There must be a thousand Nicaraguan men in this city and one of them failed to look both ways.  I start to turn the page and then I see the boots.

I feel my heart seize and the shock wave goes through me to my fingers and toes.

Those are his boots.
No, they’re not.
We bought them in the market in Rivas.
No, they’re not.

I look as hard as I can at the photograph. I hold it closer. I hold it farther away.

The buckles are different.
No, they’re not.
The strap is different.

The truth is I can’t really see the buckle or the strap.

“No identificado,” it says, “en Bajada Grande.”

Why would he have been in Bajada Grande?
It’s a free country.
He doesn’t even know anyone in Bajada Grande.
Those are his boots.

I would know. I didn’t want to buy them for him. They were so expensive; so much more than what he really needed. But he wanted them. He tried them on and said they were perfect. And they were really gorgeous black boots. They made him look sexier than ever. I wanted to say, “It’s too much, amor. This money is all I have and it seems like so much to you but it is nothing. Nothing. I have to get on a plane and fly away. I have to go places and do things and I’m not really your wife or even your girlfriend. I’m using you.” I bought him the boots.

I didn’t buy him those boots to die in them.
They’re not the same boots. They’re different.
You can’t prove they are.
You can’t prove they aren’t.

My God I never wanted to see him again. He stalked me, pursued me, terrified me. But I didn’t want him to die in the street atropellado with his boots on. I wanted him to wear the soles through dancing with girls young and beautiful as he.

Is he dead?
Is the city safe, now, for me?
Can I stop walking with my head down between bus stops?
Glancing over my shoulder to see I’m not being followed?

I am dizzy.

Say what you want, I know those boots.
They’re not the same boots.
Is he really gone? Am I safe now?
You’re paranoid.

I don’t know which voice I want to be right and which I want to be wrong.

All I know is that I know those boots.
They’re not the same boots.

Daniel

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Daniel hates to work. Every day he throws back his head and laughs, says he’s celebrating El Día de San Pepino. El santo de los perezosos, he says.

A woman will kill him someday. His first wife didn’t succeed but sooner or later a less frightened one will; his first wife was a child. Daniel awakened to find 14-year-old Susana holding a butcher knife to his throat, but she was too afraid to push it in. He laughs about the wild times he had while she waited for him at home. That was back when he’d won the lottery and for two years he had it all—money, a motorcycle, a young wife.

Daniel always laughs. He lives with his mamá and he shrugs. Things didn’t work out.

Daniel, él que dice que se casa el treinta de febrero. Daniel, who can win and lose and never notice the game.

Furniture (from “The Riotous Walls”)

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(From The Riotous Walls, unpublished short novel)

Furniture, it turns out, is a luxury. You don’t need it to survive. Of course rooms look better with things in them, but our economic problems out-shouted the aesthetic ones. Between the four of us, we owned a mountain of cardboard boxes, one fan, four lamps, two clocks and a total of six single mattresses, all stolen from the college dorm. I don’t know how we got too many. Beth and I took two, threw them on our floor and pushed them together to make one big bed. Nina and Sheila too two, threw them on their floor and pushed them to opposite sides of the room. They were friends, but not best friends like Beth and me. The two leftovers went into the Passion Pit. We would have had to wear our clothes of out of the cardboard boxes if the rooms hadn’t included closets with shelves.

The only piece of furniture that came with the apartment was The Desk. The living room boasted a Desk so immense and so Heavy that it could only have been assembled in that very room. No human being could have gotten it up the precarious stairs and even God couldn’t have gotten it through the door. We could have used it as a table had we owned a chair. As it were, we put Sheila’s ancient stereo on it and stashed things in its drawers. I guess we could have painted furniture on the walls. In the end, it’s probably the only thing we didn’t paint on them.

. . .

Beth rode the couch, lounging like Queen Bathsheba, the day Mark and Curtis carried it to us. Tony Royal, or friend the cafeteria thief, said we could have it when he graduated he left town forever. It’s not the kind of thing you would take with you. You would, in fact, feel fortunate if you were able to give it away. It was a furry stained nursing-home pink and had offensive sprung springs but you could lay, sit or stand on it. You could lose things in it or under it. But it was our only piece of furniture which made it as hard to hate as it was to love.

I can’t believe Beth had the nerve to lie on it all the way home. I would never do that. But then again, I weigh a lot more than she does. That’s the effect Beth has on men; they happily carry her a mile in the summer sun while she lies on a couch. Me; not exactly.

When the day finally came to remove it, we didn’t carry it down the precarious stairway to the street as carefully as we carried it up. We hauled it to the door and threw it off the porch. It crashed to the ground and then we set it on fire. The neighbor man who hates us called the police so we had to say it was an accident.

That was a great idea. It was much easier to throw away after it was all burned up.

Ana

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I know Ana too well. We are like sisters, now. We each know when the other is lying.

Sometimes I can’t digest my lunch I the same room with her because in her silence, she is saying to me, you don’t think I know what you did and in my silence she knows I am lying. I have to go lie on the bed in front of the fan.

We’re all we have, as if we were born with the same last names, but I sometimes sit outside at night so I won’t hear her screaming at me as she quietly watches tv.

-Estás enojada conmigo?- I ask her.
-Ni quiera Dios,- she says to me. -No.-

Suitcases

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You are sitting there in the living room with your shoes on and your hat.
And the tv is off which is impossible.
And there are suitcases beside you.

You say you are leaving. That much I can see for myself.

You say you shouldn’t have come here in the first place.
You say I don’t love you.
You say you read that in my diary.

I don’t say anything.
Clearly, you have helped yourself to my words.

You say the driver will be here for you any minute and he is.
I say goodbye.

The first time you left me you snuck away like coward and I nearly died of grief and rage.
But you begged to come back.
Maybe I wanted to see you walk away like a man; watch you walk out the door with your shoes on and your hat.
Maybe I wanted to remember you as the back of a hat and two sets of white knuckles clutching your suitcases.

Penance

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(From A Map Of The River, an unpublished short novel/prose poem)

…..

Washing clothes by hand in the pila is nothing new for me.
In Los Rios I have left behind a small white washer, but before I had it I washed in the way of our Grandmothers.
I know how to do this.
It is an important thing a woman must know.
The little girls on the block come to stare.
They have never seen a white woman wash.
They don’t suppose we know how.
They ask me “Sabe usted lavar?”
I answer them,”Sí” and still they stand in disbelief to watch.

Consuelo wet the clothes in the stone sink, sprinkled them with soap and scrubbed, deftly rolling and unrolling them against the rough surface. I watched her rinse them with scoops of fresh water from a gourd dish, then a hard wring with her muscled brown arms. She came to our house every morning to wash for Guadalupe, her four grown sons and her young boy. With her came Nanci, her five year old animal-child who grunted and screamed, scratched and stole, who learned the unintelligible speech of her mother. She is the one on whom the poor take pity because her poverty is complete.

Consuelo and her animal-daughter Nanci came to wash and I learned to understand their grunted language. The payment for Consuelo’s work were the plates of rice and beans which she and Nanci ate at midday. I watched them. They watched me. Consuelo offered to wash my clothes for small fee and I said no. She had no way of understanding my desire to learn so she thought I was stingy and mean. She watched me without pretending not to as I struggled to wash my own clothes, a clumsy imitation of her efficiency. Guadalupe’s sons watched me wash. Neighbors who stopped by watched me wash.  All of my life, people have stopped to watch me wash.  A gringa washing clothes by hand: who knew it was possible?

Later, in our rented house in Santa Cruz, before we had money to buy the small plastic washer, I washed everything by hand on Saturday mornings. Towels, bedding, the clay-encrusted work clothes of a potter went into the sink on the porch. I sweated out the penance for my sins one by one. Penance for selfishness were the shirts, penance for untruths were the stained socks to be whitened but not stretched. Penance for leaving my home and my traditions were jeans ground in the mud. Bed sheets were the penance for the iniquities of the unwed. Towels were the penance for having been born rich enough never to have hand-washed towels. When I finished, I was spent; drenched in suds and sweat, knuckles raw, wrists limp, back splitting, dizzy with exhaustion and the relief that comes only from cleaning your conscience along with your clothes.

…..

Bad Monkey Woman

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“Get down from there,” he says to me on my perch in the tamarindo tree, “or you’ll turn into a bad monkey woman.”

I think he is joking, so I throw my head back and laugh my best carefree laugh.
He is teasing me as if I were his little girl.  In my country they tell children they’ll break their necks.  Monkey woman!  Ha ha.

“Get down from there.”   He says it again.  “It’s bad to climb trees in Semana Santa.  You’ll grow a tail like a monkey.”

“Me?” I ask.
Is he serious?  This man honestly thinks climbing a tree this week could turn me into a monkey?  Oh my.
I smile my most reassuring smile.

“Yes.  Get down from there.  Now.”

Suddenly I can’t move.
He is serious.  Holy God.

“Come on,” he says.

His eyes are shifting and they won’t look at me.  His voice has gone cold and his face is turning dark as night.  Everyone has grown quiet.  Everyone is looking away.  Only the radio continues to blurt out tinny salsa music.

Suddenly I sense the fear.

I try to swallow my disgust as I swing down out of the tamarindo, embarrassed.
How in God’s name was I supposed to know that climbing a tree in Semana Santa puts you in danger of becoming a monkey?  How?

And don’t tell me they really think that.

“Let’s go back to the house,” he says and it isn’t a suggestion, it is a command.   We start back to the house.  His face dark and fearful.

Tears of humiliation begin to prick my eyes and nose like pins.  I am being taken home like a disobedient child.

I didn’t know.  Geez.  I’m sorry.

“You can’t climb trees in Semana Santa,” he explains.  “It’s bad.  You can turn into a bad monkey woman.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, my lip quivering uncontrollably like the child I feel I am being treated as.  “I didn’t know that.”

“I know,” he says.  “Don’t cry.”  He pats me on the arm and laughs nervously.  “Don’t cry.”

“Ok,” I say, wiping my nose with the back of my hand and feeling the start of a flood.  I want to turn into a bug and crawl away.

When we get to the house, I go into my room and quietly cry out my humiliation and frustration.  I don’t want to be a bad monkey woman.  I want to be happy and good.  On one hand, his believing I could turn into a monkey and my crying about it are equally ridiculous.  But he can’t help it and neither can I.

Thinking about how funny it is makes me cry harder.

The Chicken or The Eggs

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Maria Lucía points to the hen, then to Fernanda and laughs.
I don’t understand.

Fernanda is eyeing my hen.
She wants to eat her.

No, no!  Fernanda says, pressing her hands to her heart.
Maria Lucía is eyeing her own hen.
She wants to eat her.

Now we are all giggling and I confess to myself that I also want eat her.
We laugh at each other’s hunger for meat, weighing one pot of stew against all those eggs.

White Buckets

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 I

María Pablo is sitting round on her bed with Carlitos when I enter.  Carlitos is eating a tortilla and cheese with both grubby hands, and María is petting his hair.  It’s another boy, due in May.  I don’t take my coat off because the room is that cold.

“No puedo dormir,” she tells me.  Her back hurts, the baby moves.  Carlitos wants to sleep with her, and Vicente and even Adolfo who is almost 11, when it is cold.  There is another bed in the room piled with clothes and broken toys.

 

 II

 “Cuántos años tienes?”

“No sé.  Como veinticuatro.”

“En qué año naciste?”

“En ochenta y cuatro.”

“En cuál mes?”

“Diciembre.”

“Diciembre?  Entonces tienes veintisiete – casi veintiocho.”

“Veintiocho!  Sí, sí!  Veintiocho!”  She laughs.

 

 III

She brings me the letter typed in little black letters with the green logo of the county courthouse.  She is dusty and her back hurts from bending between the rows of the onion fields.

“Qué dice?” she asks me.

They want the name of baby Alejandro’s daddy if she’s to continue receiving government cash to pay the rent.  I know the answer to the question.  She has told me before.

Now she drops her eyes and isn’t looking at me when she repeats it: “Es que no sé.”

This time I have to press her.  The blanks on the paper are staring at us.  “No sabes su nombre o no sabes cuál es?”  I ask in the politest way I can think of.

“Yo sé quien es,” she says looking up, “Pero no sé donde está.”

“Y no sabes su nombre.”

“No,” she agrees.

 

 IV

She comes to me with another green and black letter.  Baby Alejandro nurses hungrily.  Carlitos stands guard, beside.

“Qué dice?” she asks me, and I tell her.   She has to go to the courthouse on Thursday at 2:00 to answer some questions about baby Alejandro’s daddy.

“Es que no sé,” she insists.

I know, I tell her, but you’re going to have to tell them that in person.

“Es que tengo verguenza,” she pleads.

“María,” I ask her slowly, “Te violaron?  O fue una cosa entre los dos?”

“No,” she says, looking at the floor.  “Fue una cosa entre los dos.”

Did you love him?, I want to ask her.  Cuénteme.  But I don’t.

 

 V

I meet them at the courthouse:  María, baby Alejandro, Carlitos and this time Vicente, too.  School is out for the summer.  The courthouse clerk speaks Spanish so she doesn’t need an interpreter, but I’m already there.  I make myself useful holding baby Alejandro.

“Dónde está el papá de su bebé?” the clerk asks her.

“No sé,” María tells her.

“Cómo se llama?” asks the clerk.

“No sé,” María answers.

Then she does something that I cannot believe.  María Pablo opens her purse.  She pulls out the remains of a mysteriously masculine-looking wallet stuffed with pieces of paper.  And from the wallet, she produces a Washington State ID card with a man’s name and picture.  She hands it to the courthouse clerk.

“Es él?” the clerk asks.

“Sí,” replies María.

I all but drop baby Alejandro on the floor.  I am stupefied.  She doesn’t know his name but she has his ID?  I know she can’t read.  But?  She could have shown me the ID.  María is not laying all her cards on the table.

I am somehow delighted.  I knew she wasn’t stupid.

Did he leave without his ID?  Hardly.  His wallet?  And never come back?  María, did you steal it?!

The clerk writes the name of baby Alejandro’s daddy and gives the ID back to María.  María says she thinks he’s in Oregon.

We walk out the door, baby Alejandro safe in his mother’s arms, Carlitos and Vicente in tow.  Something stops me from pointing out that she hasn’t been exactly straight with me.  For some reason, I have to leave her that little bit of dignity when way say goodbye.

I laugh out loud all the way back to my office–shocked, amazed, imagining a hundred possible scenarios.  I am laughing at myself.

 

 VI

Sandra walks over to my desk and says, “I have bad news for you.

“What?”

“Carmen was here filling out housing applications.  She said that María Pablo got beat up last night by her husband.”

The f-word flies out of my mouth like a startled bird, and then, “María Pablo doesn’t have a husband.”

“I know,” Sandra says. “But Carmen, who lives with her, was just here, and she said she does.  She said last night he was beating her up.  Carmen’s husband got involved and María’s husband threatened him, so now they have to move out.”

“Fucking María Pablo,” I say, while I turn off the computer and get the keys.  I have to go see her.

I drive to her house in dread.  But María doesn’t have a husband.  I know she doesn’t.  A lover maybe, that, out of politeness Carmen called an esposo?

Now I am going to get to the bottom of this.  Seriously.

 

 VII

María is sitting on her bed nursing baby Alejandro.  Carlitos is in a corner playing with empty cereal boxes.  She smiles widely when she sees me.

Where are the bruises?  The eyes swollen from crying?  She has nothing.  Her round brown face and white shining eyes glow humid in the July heat.  Her sleeveless top exposes two plump brown arms, unmarked.  Alejandro feeds from a perfect left breast.

“Siéntate,” she says, and I sit on the bed beside her.

This time I register every object in the room.  Women’s shoes, and shoes for little boys.  Baby clothes.  A few broken toys.  Her purse.  Adolfo’s school books, abandoned.  Winter blankets, piled.  If María has an esposo, in this world he owns nothing but the clothes on his back.  No hat, no shirt, no belt or pair of jeans, no razor, no cologne, no pair of shoes.  Or she hides him so completely I cannot find him, even unannounced.

“Cómo está?” I ask her.  “Todo está bien?” searching questions without saying Carmen came and told us what happened.

“Muy bien,” she says.  “Cansada, porque todo el tiempo este bebé quiere comer.”

“Se siente bien? Necesita algo?”

“No,” María says sweetly.  “Aquí estamos bien.”

I walk out the door more confused than I walked in.  Relieved not to see bruises, perplexed by her peace.  Somebody is selling me bullshit and I am buying it all.

 

 VIII

She comes to see me in the fall, but I am out.  Beside my desk, she leaves two white buckets overflowing with onions.

It isn’t fair.  I don’t deserve a gift.  She is my job, and everything I do for her is paid by the hour.  I would like to give a gift to her, but I may not.  When I took her the clothes that I bought for baby Alejandro that at Goodwill, I told her
they were something someone dropped off at the clinic.

 

 IX

“Nos vamos con mi hermano a California,” she tells me, as the leaves begin to curl yellow.  “Aquí es muy frío y no hay trabajo.”

The last time I see them, somber-eyed Adolfo is bouncing baby Alejandro on his knees, making him cough up bursts of hilarious baby giggles.  María, somewhere, has found the money to color her hair a curious shade of red.  And that’s it.  She’s gone.  Adolfo, Vicente, Carlitos and baby Alejandro.  Just gone.

I look for her everywhere.  Maybe someday she will come back.  Maybe in the summer when California gets too hot.  I hope she finds a clinic, there, that will give her a shot in three months.  If she doesn’t, there will be more babies for Adolfo to play with.

 

 X

María Pablo, with her Nahuatl dialect, her broken Spanish, her sunshine smile and her fearless heart.  We’re even.  We told some truth, told some lies, everything scripted by the state.  Everything but the generous white buckets of onions.

I stand in my kitchen slicing, and giggle at my silly onion tears.  She’s somewhere in the world this morning making quesadillas for her boys, working in the fields, telling nosey social workers with bleeding hearts just enough of the truth to get what she needs: help making a phone call, free second-hand baby clothes, a feeling of friendship.