Fiction

“Where did you find her?” I ask. 

Cigarette butts, wilted leaves, and little gray feathers fall into the sink as water runs through her arteries. 

“Leaking by the Bethesda Terrace,” he responds. He takes a seat at my two-person kitchen table. He keeps his arms and legs close to his body. His hands rub at the red stain on his sweatshirt.

I nod, that’s where she always goes.

…Mamá knocks on my door in the early morning. The sky is dark still, the sun in hiding. She sits on the edge of my bed and strokes my hair like she used to do when I was just a kid. We have cereal for breakfast, and the sound of our crunching syncs up. We don’t talk about tía Marisol. We leave Sepelio behind and go to San Francisco.

The water he moved through was resistant, like water in the real world. Only this wasn’t real; it was just a feeling—a strange feeling, but all in his head. He couldn’t ignore it, but he learned to isolate that part of his experience—to box it up and put it away.

They danced on my molars and hid in my gums. They echoed my thoughts as I had them, especially the soft ones, forming like cotton between the teeth, and the violent ones, burning at those I hated.

The tiger girl is Savannah pulled inside out, her sunset gaze crisscrossed in my room, her slow growls barnacled on my mind. At night, she follows me to the grimy corners of the city where alcohol and loneliness never end. She steps from behind the pillars of an old fort or a warehouse and chases me home.

“I tell you, ah girl,” said Auntie Mel, “once you give birth your entire world will change. All the things you thought were important—career, money, even your husband lah—become secondary. Motherhood will become you. Listen to ah yi.”

My mother couldn’t help but chime in. “Yeah yeah. Once I had you everything else melted away.”

Near the end of August my father drove me to the Amtrak station in White River Junction. He bought me a yogurt, egg salad sandwich, and granola bar at the co-op, counting his change before putting it in the pocket of his jean shorts. The store-bought lunch made me feel guilty and sad. So did […]

In those last days, before the world ended, Lucia Salvador Calderón lived by the lists she made. Her blessings became inventory. She wrote them down to remind herself: she had the banana tree in the backyard; she had the ceramic tiles on the bathroom floor, cool against the soles of her feet; she had the […]