*Non-Fiction — August 4, 2022
I could live in water
1. The word, “cuckoo.” Say it twice. From an early age, it meant grandfather clocks and mothers. I learned to point my finger at my ear and rotate it in wider, delicate circles. Point at my mother and point at my ear. Later, I pointed at myself.
2. Trauma rewrites. It takes. The film of my life is missing scenes. Some scenes loop. The order is all wrong. It is both abbreviated and too long, too loud. There is no art to it.
3. Ma taught, not professionally. She led a whole class on hypervigilance. One is never too young to learn about danger. Meerkats dine on dangerous prey. Mas teach pups to roll millipedes in the sand and smother the toxic coating of their exoskeletons, to guillotine the stinger of venomous scorpions. Ma keeps dangling scorpions in my face.
4. The clinical term is perseveration, a symptom of the schizophrenia. It bears repeating: I was going to be mistreated, molested, and killed, Ma said. Suspected abusers and murderers included my dad; his parents; her mother; her sisters; her aunts; her brother who was actually her nephew; the neighbors again and again; the teachers; the babysitters; gay men; loose women; the men at the homeless shelters, the women at the homeless shelters; the President; Janet Reno; the Colombian mafia; the Cuban mafia; the Mexican mafia; the woman who never showed her eyes; the man who worked with her at Holiday Inn & Suites and appeared everywhere; the thieves that clambered on top of multiple homes where we lived (the sound of the hot Florida sun beating down on the warped metal roof, I could hear it, a thing was knocking, attacking, pelting, penetrating our ceiling, I ran out to the 7/11 two blocks away for help but I misplaced my conviction, I knew no one would help me and I returned and blasted the TV until The Bold and The Beautiful was the only thing I could hear, once I could see it: the blue jeans of a man up in the avocado tree, the flash of denim probably a bolt of blue sky, my father dismissed us both that day); the Pentecostal homeless mission, where after four hours of required kneeling the parishioners began speaking in tongues and we hightailed it out of there on the last city bus of the night; my friends.
5. St. Petersburg, 1994. Under the Gulf of Mexico, I held my breath until I could burst. I did not want to surface.
6. Miami, 1992. When you walk a lonely road, always look behind you. One time an Opa Locka man black like his city ran at me, but when I turned my body to look back at him he missed my purse. I imagined that he then melted back into the shadows . . . . When you walk into a Little Havana Catholic Church and it’s just you and a man, don’t look because there’s no time for that but hurry out of there run run run. I didn’t and he flashed eyes like a devil with rabies or a piece of rusted metal. He took my wallet with ten dollars and your Social Security card.
7. I always chose the destination. When I was six: Atlanta, because it was far enough away from my father, and I liked the taste of the syllables in my mouth. When I was seven: I don’t remember why, but St. Petersburg. When I was 13: Phoenix, because this was the “Best Place to Live in the U.S.” according to Places Rated Almanac, and I appreciated symbolism. When I was 14: San Antonio, because on a layover on the Greyhound on the way to Phoenix we ate at a McDonalds around dusk and the trees shimmered with noise. The birdsong mesmerized.
8. Teyuna, Colombia, 1998. An hour away from Ma’s hometown and minutes away from the Caribbean Sea, the Sierra Nevada Mountains rise rise rise. The mountain range is home to multiple tribes and the most biodiversity in bird species worldwide. A continent away the bird medicine of my indigenous ancestors called to me.
9. San Antonio, 1998. It was only after arriving in San Antonio that we realized the source of the racket: grackles, black birds that spend their day walking in diagonals and side-eyeing.
10. Miami, 1984. I was late. People were waiting. Jesus Christ was born again via Cesarean section at Jackson Memorial Hospital. (Years later Ma stopped calling me Jesus and started calling me a maricón.) I waited two weeks to be born, or did she wait two weeks to let go of me? Perhaps it was a mutual decision. Later, in the hospital corridor, Ma ran into her sister, whose water had broken like tears. Birth was imminent. She had spent years avoiding Tatianna. She had moved countries to get away—even before the schizophrenia turned her mind away from her family and the world.
11. St. Petersburg, 1993. She told me she worried that Tatianna had planned to switch her infant with me. Later, I wondered if she’d been successful, if all along I was someone else. I worried if Ma wondered that too.
12. Miami, 1989. Early on it was hard to figure out who was the problem. Each night as he watched reruns of Cheers my father scooped handfuls of pink out of Dubble Bubble bubble gum bags. He inhaled the color. I don’t remember his face. I don’t remember his hands operating on each individual gum wrapper. I don’t remember the mastication or the noise. I don’t remember what he did with the gum when he had enough. His other hobbies included erecting homemade radios, essentially green paneled galaxies of screws and wires, pitching horseshoes, and repairing old campers with silicone rubber. He’d invent presents out of transparent balls of silicone. I didn’t have any other toys, but these balls didn’t bounce, and I discarded heaps of them. When inevitably I saw them again abandoned on the ground, they reminded me of everything I didn’t have.
13. Islamorada, 1990. Do you see your father talking to that blonde boy? He wants that boy to be his son. Ma fumes. Everyone is in the water. The boy and my father probably hear. Seaweed catches my ankle. The water is warm. The boy ignores me. I don’t know of any other beach days with my father. The trailer with the hole in the floor is walking distance from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s that close, but still too far.
14. Miami, 1988. My father was an abuser, but Ma had claws too. Sometimes he’d allow her to slash crisscross across his back. A couple times he egged her on and then had her involuntarily hospitalized under Florida’s Baker Act. I remembered the police arriving but I never remembered how she left. I visited her twice in the mental hospital. The floor was pebbled, and I crouched and palpated the stones, admiring the smoothness. I sounded out the jagged consonants. Schiz-o-phre-nia. I know this was one of the first words I learned because she was hospitalized for this condition when I was so young and after my father left, I never heard the word again. To her this word was violence. She forbade it. Later I weaponized it during our yelling matches. I knew what the word meant.
15. Miami, 1990. My parents were always happiest at the hospital and when we were coming home from the battered women’s shelters. In between my father reciting his script that things, all of the things, will be different this time, I tell my parents that I want a doll. Not just any doll, but one of the porcelain dolls with pink cheeks, tight blonde curls, and vacant eyes in the air-conditioned antique shop. This was one of two rare but sublime sweetnesses during those days of waiting, waiting, waiting for the shelter which was closed for the day. In the evenings, they’d readmit the abused and neglected. (The other was grazing on the dulce de coco from the street vendors in Downtown Miami while I marveled at the MetroRail cars suspended in the air, which appeared futuristic but inside smelled like piss, and the policemen on horseback and the horseshit on the streets.)
Silence.
I interrupt the sales pitch. He pauses. I break the spell that returned Ma and I to him after we fled to Barranquilla and Denver. My father replies that he will buy it next paycheck, which was another standard script, but I also hear him tell Ma that a boy shouldn’t want a doll. But I did.
16. Ithaca, 2009. When Ian, the first straight man, left, I feared that I would drop out of law school. That he didn’t care about me because he knew my truth. That he disliked who I was. That without him I could not live. That, worse, without him I would have unprotected sex with countless strangers, contract HIV, shapeshift into a desperate junkie, and jump from the Verrazano. Like that, I discovered an inheritance: madness. I tried to love Ian and Hector and Rob like Ma loved me. Ian lectured me about self-fulfilling prophecies. We were both mostly right.
17. Madness is not uncommon.
18. Hudson, 1995. I don’t remember the dead woman’s name. Ma suspected Mary, another resident of another homeless shelter where we stayed, of pushing the woman into traffic. Mary wore a frazzled Golden Girls-style blonde bouffant and striking turquoise blue eyeshadow applied with the heavy hand of a drag queen, although you could tell she was the type of woman who loathed gay men. I’d met the dead woman the day before her accident, after her arrival to the shelter. She was also blonde, tall, statuesque, and the first person besides my parents who I saw half-naked. She would lounge around in her bright white bra and panties, a white so pristine and unblemished it glowed. The only other thing she wore was an air of either languidness or muted malaise. She barely spoke except to ask for cigarettes, a chain-smoking Marlboro cigarette Barbie. On the way to school that morning, I saw a bald eagle circling overhead like a vulture. The fifth-grade class was welcoming and eager to know me.
16. Ithaca, 2009. When Ian, the first straight man, left, I feared that I would drop out of law school. That he didn’t care about me because he knew my truth. That he disliked who I was. That without him I could not live. That, worse, without him I would have unprotected sex with countless strangers, contract HIV, shapeshift into a desperate junkie, and jump from the Verrazano. Like that, I discovered an inheritance: madness. I tried to love Ian and Hector and Rob like Ma loved me. Ian lectured me about self-fulfilling prophecies. We were both mostly right.
17. Madness is not uncommon.
18. Hudson, 1995. I don’t remember the dead woman’s name. Ma suspected Mary, another resident of another homeless shelter where we stayed, of pushing the woman into traffic. Mary wore a frazzled Golden Girls-style blonde bouffant and striking turquoise blue eyeshadow applied with the heavy hand of a drag queen, although you could tell she was the type of woman who loathed gay men. I’d met the dead woman the day before her accident, after her arrival to the shelter. She was also blonde, tall, statuesque, and the first person besides my parents who I saw half-naked. She would lounge around in her bright white bra and panties, a white so pristine and unblemished it glowed. The only other thing she wore was an air of either languidness or muted malaise. She barely spoke except to ask for cigarettes, a chain-smoking Marlboro cigarette Barbie. On the way to school that morning, I saw a bald eagle circling overhead like a vulture. The fifth-grade class was welcoming and eager to know me.
I was happy and hopeful coming home that day until my Ma told me that the cigarette Barbie ended (up) in a vehicular collision. Draped from head to toe in fluorescent white she floated up to heaven painstakingly slow as hundreds of God-fearing trailer trash (my father’s people) and leather-skinned snowbirds bore witness. Other birds, laughing gulls and mourning doves, eyed the woman until she vanished in the marshmallow sky and then they too flew away.
19. Under federal law, a child qualifies as homeless if he “lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” But the law couldn’t fix my situation. My reality was legal, permissible, sanctioned by the state, defined. Examples of the dwellings of homeless children include emergency shelters, living “doubled up,” which means with a friend or relative because you can’t afford anything better, motels, trailer parks, camping grounds, and substandard housing. I had lived in all the places. Multiple times. I would be continually homeless from the day I was born until I was 14 years old.
20. St. Petersburg, 1993. Walking to school alone, I leave the house before the school crossing guard, the nice neon lady, gets to where the school kids cross the street because my mom is afraid the neighbors will get me, on the way I steal a calamondin orange, I marvel at the orangeness of the orange and then the sourness of the innards and the sweetness of the rind, I eat it whole, at the jumping off point, I look one way, then the other, wait for a car to pass, lose track of time, forget to look again the other way, step into the street or did I leap, was I always leaping? was I always making a getaway? when I’m intercepted by a white sports car, the car runs over my white sneaker, the wheels caterwaul, the car 360s. I look down. My shoe is like tortilla dough after a rolling pin. A miracle, I have no pain, nothing broken. I lurch, then lope to school. The car lurches in the opposite direction. Above pigeons on a power line rubberneck. I pass the Jacaranda tree, and I trample the deep lavender blossoms and the weeds that rise between the lines of sidewalk. I’m in the breakfast cafeteria, scared I’m about to get in trouble for not knowing how to cross a street, for being reckless. The creepy janitor calls out my name, takes me to the office, where I’m told the driver doubled back to check out what the damage was.
19. Under federal law, a child qualifies as homeless if he “lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” But the law couldn’t fix my situation. My reality was legal, permissible, sanctioned by the state, defined. Examples of the dwellings of homeless children include emergency shelters, living “doubled up,” which means with a friend or relative because you can’t afford anything better, motels, trailer parks, camping grounds, and substandard housing. I had lived in all the places. Multiple times. I would be continually homeless from the day I was born until I was 14 years old.
20. St. Petersburg, 1993. Walking to school alone, I leave the house before the school crossing guard, the nice neon lady, gets to where the school kids cross the street because my mom is afraid the neighbors will get me, on the way I steal a calamondin orange, I marvel at the orangeness of the orange and then the sourness of the innards and the sweetness of the rind, I eat it whole, at the jumping off point, I look one way, then the other, wait for a car to pass, lose track of time, forget to look again the other way, step into the street or did I leap, was I always leaping? was I always making a getaway? when I’m intercepted by a white sports car, the car runs over my white sneaker, the wheels caterwaul, the car 360s. I look down. My shoe is like tortilla dough after a rolling pin. A miracle, I have no pain, nothing broken. I lurch, then lope to school. The car lurches in the opposite direction. Above pigeons on a power line rubberneck. I pass the Jacaranda tree, and I trample the deep lavender blossoms and the weeds that rise between the lines of sidewalk. I’m in the breakfast cafeteria, scared I’m about to get in trouble for not knowing how to cross a street, for being reckless. The creepy janitor calls out my name, takes me to the office, where I’m told the driver doubled back to check out what the damage was.
The secretary types out a letter to give to my mom. The lady mimes standard protocol and as she types, she exhibits no emotion. She hands the letter to me. I hold the antiseptic letter. I wilt under an a/c vent. I’m asked questions, but no one touches my foot. I remember fear. How would Ma respond? She had entrusted a responsibility to me, because she had to leave early to get to her job at the hotel, where she eliminated and rearranged the detritus of lazy, wealthy people, and she couldn’t drop me off two, three hours before school opened without raising alarm and Child Protective Services. I failed this responsibility. The memory of my anxiety is vivid, but not her response to the letter.
I imagine she was happy that I survived, but I imagine we also quickly moved on.
21. Atlanta, 1991. Too poor to afford Tylenol but not Vicks, Ma was trying to sweat me out. Whenever I was sick, which was often, she’d swaddle me in an avalanche of comforters and blankets and jackets and sweaters. Floor heaters surrounded me on all sides. This time I struggled to breathe, and the fever refused to break. I refused to break, not now. I screamed and woke up the homeless shelter. A nightmare memory: the bright light of a train closing in is engraved in my mind. It visits every now and then like a lighthouse.
21. Atlanta, 1991. Too poor to afford Tylenol but not Vicks, Ma was trying to sweat me out. Whenever I was sick, which was often, she’d swaddle me in an avalanche of comforters and blankets and jackets and sweaters. Floor heaters surrounded me on all sides. This time I struggled to breathe, and the fever refused to break. I refused to break, not now. I screamed and woke up the homeless shelter. A nightmare memory: the bright light of a train closing in is engraved in my mind. It visits every now and then like a lighthouse.
At an ER a couple months later, I had an allergic reaction to prednisone, a medicine to treat allergic reactions and my asthma. Anaphylactic shock. The doctor didn’t believe Ma when she explained that the pill induced my shock. She prescribed it again, and I took it, and I couldn’t breathe. They strapped me to a gurney in an ambulance and raced to medical attention. Ma said they were trying to kill me.
22. I tell my therapist, “The things that have saved me have also hurt me,” and she praises me for breaking through.
23. Santa Marta, 2016. I picked up a man, a trickster maybe, at the video store, where men sat in folding chairs in a circle in the back, watched gay porn, and jerked off. I don’t remember his name, but I remember the knife marks strewn across his body, a constellation that made no sense to me. I didn’t know his trickster lineage. I don’t know my own. We didn’t talk about our forefathers as I sucked his dick.
22. I tell my therapist, “The things that have saved me have also hurt me,” and she praises me for breaking through.
23. Santa Marta, 2016. I picked up a man, a trickster maybe, at the video store, where men sat in folding chairs in a circle in the back, watched gay porn, and jerked off. I don’t remember his name, but I remember the knife marks strewn across his body, a constellation that made no sense to me. I didn’t know his trickster lineage. I don’t know my own. We didn’t talk about our forefathers as I sucked his dick.
But he was more likely a man like me struggling to survive. He smiled at me the way men from the Coast smiled, a dulcet mischief stored in the lips and the eyes. Parts of his body peeked through holes in his faded blue jeans. I mostly remember his smooth caramelness, the color of my ancestors, a color I wish were my own. I purchased his body for the night and five grams of cocaine, and when he took off his clothes, the caramelness unspooled and undid.
He was part of my second plan to commit suicide that night. I don’t remember my first. Dazed, I went to Exito, a supermarket, and bought the largest knife they had, then walked back to my room, stowing the knife in my carry-on, and then to the video store. With the drugs, I hoped for a deeper plunge into psychosis, one where I could irredeemably hurt myself. The man and I walked neighborhoods. He warned me that I was in danger and not to leave his side. I thought of holding his hand and how it would be romantic but I didn’t. He went into a house and directed me not to leave my spot on the sidewalk. He came out hands in pocket.
At Casa de Leda, where he unspooled, I held him in my mouth, and he spoke to me. He denied me everything else. He said I was kind and beautiful and while I didn’t believe him, it disoriented me. He complimented me on my abilities and pointed to the baggies and said I should not do too much, that it could become a problem for me. He said I had sad eyes and asked why did I have such eyes. I remembered all of the men I had fucked, how some had told me to look into their eyes, how they probably saw my anger, my vacancy, my fear, all of my shame, and they still fucked me anyway. He asked me if I was going to hurt him. He had by now most likely combed through my luggage and found the knife. I told him no. We were both afraid.
He found me a cheaper hotel, what looked like a hooker hotel, but I didn’t care, and he left me, taking a couple hundred American dollars and my iPhone. I had wanted to believe even though I also wanted to die. I slept on a bedsheet that did not fit a mattress made of stiff plastic and so I slept on the mattress and I cried for two days and I halfheartedly executed my third plan, but when I asked for prednisone (for anaphylaxis), the pharmacist gave me prednisolone. That extra pair of letters did nothing, and the next day I rejoined a friend and her mom and went back to the U.S. and then to rehab.
Tricksters get a bad rap. Sex workers get a bad rap. Men get a bad rap. Unlike any other man in my life, this man saved me, and sometimes I wonder what happened to him and if he has a husband or a wife and if he is happy and if he is selling his body still and I hope he is not and maybe he is running a thriving business and he can put food on the table for his family and he can stop getting knifed and stop having strangers’ lips and tongues trace the topography of his body like land surveyors but I know real life but I hope for an alternate storyline.
24. Greensboro, 2014. Flashes of indigo in the trees as tanagers flitted. I almost landed on a copperhead coiled and ready to strike. At dusk they crawled out of the grass near the pond to rest on the heated sidewalk. There was always danger on our runs. He had the same name as me and my father’s. I was slower, and he’d run forward and then return to check on me. The best moments were when my feet could match his and we ran. The sky was all shades of blended orange and pink, like cheap store brand sherbet, and I thrilled. Night fell, and I did not want to leave.
24. Greensboro, 2014. Flashes of indigo in the trees as tanagers flitted. I almost landed on a copperhead coiled and ready to strike. At dusk they crawled out of the grass near the pond to rest on the heated sidewalk. There was always danger on our runs. He had the same name as me and my father’s. I was slower, and he’d run forward and then return to check on me. The best moments were when my feet could match his and we ran. The sky was all shades of blended orange and pink, like cheap store brand sherbet, and I thrilled. Night fell, and I did not want to leave.
He had a compact build, but was muscular even though he never worked out and ate like a bird. “You body surf like this,” he said. The hair on his chest gleamed like wire. We tried again and again and I can’t say I got any better at it but it didn’t matter because someone cared about me.
25. San Antonio, 1999. My declarations of independence are ill-received, and everything is yells now. I take the quarters Ma’s been saving up for laundry. I palm them in my hand and quickly pocket them. They form a lump on the right side of my cargo shorts. I run to the payphone by the Pik-Nik. This phone says, “All long distance calls 25¢.” I pick up the receiver. This is a betrayal. I place a quarter in the slot, but it doesn’t register and the operator is demanding payment. I notice a homeless man in the Pik-Nik parking lot picking up cigarette butts and pennies. I hold the mouthpiece a little further away from my mouth. I press the knob and the coin bounces out the phone’s mouth. I try again. This time I feed the phone six quarters. It works and I get the dial tone. My fingers linger over the dialpad. But I know I don’t have any number to call. I don’t have my father’s number. He has never bothered to find me, and I have no way to find him. I don’t have my father’s number. I cry. What am I doing at the payphone? I hit the knob one more time. The phone won’t give back what I gave.
26. Homestead, 1992. I last saw my father at the tent city. He found us in the background of the evening news. He yelled at Ma until he gave up.
27. Miami, 1989. It was night and my father took a road home devoid of the lights of cars or homes, an unyielding darkness. Ma trembled with fear and screamed and dared him to stop and deposit us on the side of the road. Reverse psychology. I prepared myself to tuck and roll.
28. Dallas, 2014. I sang along to “Ultraviolence,” and smoked weed with Hector every night. He started snorting blow and leaving his mark on doors and car consoles and Xochitl, his main chick. I’d go to work and complain to my co-workers about him and how distressed I was that he might ruin his life. I did lines too because if he was doing it, I might as well. Looking back, I try to make sense, but my past self is a cipher, and I don’t have the key. There was never enough. The coke never peaked before I ran out, and after, I felt like a ghost plummeting down into a valley and then the substrate.
29. Phoenix, 1997. We fought every day. I wanted to break free. Our neighbors ignored the screams. When things got really bad, she’d scratch my arm. I’d pinch her arm back. I knew that brought back memories of her mother. When things worsened, we’d smack each other on the head. My mind would blink and then reboot. I could not contain my pain. I cratered the wall with my foot, and we left town before we paid to repair it.
30. Atlanta, 1991. His body concussed the door. Everything reverberated and trembled, including myself. Ma told me not to make noise. He would command the door to be opened. No response. He’d eventually relent. Our housing project door withstood. I never saw what he looked like. The elderly woman across the way apologized a couple times because she said it was her son and he was an alcoholic and he didn’t mean any harm. I wonder if she wanted us to open our door to him. Did she know what he was capable of? Did she hear the ferocity and primal desperation with which he attacked our door? Did she know the fear that reverberated in my seven-year-old body? That sound was Chicken Little, the sky falling down on me. We were on the second floor, and each apartment had cathedral ceilings. I remember their height because of our plan. If he ever made it through, I would open our window and shimmy the mattress on the floor through. I’d watch it land on the ground like fog descending, then jump to safety and escape to the sad gray trees abandoned by their leaves. I was fast but I worried about what would happen to Ma.
31. New York, 2012. His hand concusses the door. The booths are coffins of thin, blue-painted plywood with a monitor and a cash slot. On the screen a lingerie-clad woman who could’ve been Bettie Page stares, her eyes blank and imploring at the same time. “Put in money,” he yelled. He keeps pounding on the door until the green light above your door turns green. Bettie Page vanishes, replaced by a shirtless twink and a pizza delivery driver in an exposing uniform. Cheshire grins full of trepidation, guilt, and unbridled desire all around. A disembodied hand tries to touch you there. You let him. You glimpse a wedding band, and then back away. You don’t shutter the gloryhole as you dress. You walk out of the booth. A group of men and a yellow mop bucket wait outside. The atmosphere is somber. These men wait for a funeral to start. You wait. You escape into another booth. Undress, put yourself on display in the opposite gloryhole but look at the twink on the TV screen, his impossible muscles and organ. False urgency is an erect penis. You know that you will never have him, but you can have this. You are tugged and then embraced by a mouth. Your body takes over. You disconnect. You ejaculate. You withdraw and wipe yourself off with a coarse paper towel, pulling up the slacks you had worn hours earlier at the white shoe law firm. You hope they have not been stained by the semen on the floor. You open the booth door. You look at the floor, and you are cold.
32. St. Petersburg, 1994. The smell of the open oven baking the home because the heater won’t work, the heating coil the neon of a motel sign: No Vacancies. The smell of the oven baking your sneakers dry after your mom threw them in the tub and scrubbed all the shine away. The sneakers were falling apart at the seams. The spongy innards looked like bread.
33. Atlanta, 1991. I refused to eat at the soup kitchen. The food was cold or insipid or salty or stale, you could throw the rolls at someone and leave a dent, and the people were filthy. I didn’t use the shelter bathrooms for days because of the filth until a UTI developed, until I couldn’t pee even if I wanted to. Coins paid for a hamburger and a chocolate shake at the McDonalds across the street. But the too thick shake made me thirsty and I wanted a coke but there was no more money. I whined and I sulked and I blamed Ma because I didn’t understand poverty yet.
34. Before middle school, I tallied the number of schools I had attended: thirty. Today, I can’t vouch for the number’s accuracy. I know it was many. I’d recite the names I could remember like the alphabet: Lakewood, Woodlawn, Lakeview, West Atlanta, Mount Vernon, Avocado, Florida City . . .
35. Homestead, 1992. We had not experienced Andrew, but Ma wagered the tent city set up in the hurricane’s aftermath was a safer place for us than the housing project in Atlanta where, among other things, a man was shot downstairs. And news of hurricanes fascinated her so we posed as survivors.
36. Animals fled Metrozoo. A bison stuck in rush hour traffic. Fish walked the streets of downtown Miami. Exotic frogs bathed in washing machines. Ma worked cleanup of the Marlins stadium and rescued a stranded pancake turtle. It poked at her. Telephone poles fell like dominoes and children braved possible electrocution and braided bracelets and necklaces out of the powerline wire the color of sprinkles. The federal government had Ma sign an affidavit stating we had lied so that we were disqualified for FEMA assistance and the brand new trailers given to all of the other families, and then we left there too.
37. Miami, 1992. Don’t stick out your tongue. Do you want to be the bobo that they have turned you into? “I don’t,” I whispered. Then close your mouth. Don’t touch yourself there or you will go to hell. Did bad men do bad things to you today? Did you let them? Did you open the door to them? Is that why you are doing that? Be careful around blind people and deaf people and mute people and dwarves. They are broken and because they are broken, they will do bad things to you if you let them and then you too will break… But so will the devil. He will try to corrupt you by turning you gay and giving you HIV. He will never stop trying to corrupt you. Don’t hold your hand like that. They will think you are a sissy. Sit up straight. I don’t feel well, but if I die, what will happen to you? Why are you picking your nose? You are just like your father. You have been seeing him. I know it. How could you betray me like that? Is he going to take you away from me? You know Janet Reno took your sisters away and then I lived in a tree. When I was in the trees, I’d hear an insect that sounded like a human and I couldn’t distinguish between the two and then I couldn’t sleep. It rained. Hide in the closet. Your grandmother is at the door and she is knocking and she won’t go away. She never wanted me. She didn’t teach me how to cook. Don’t eat so much. You are going to get fat and then no one will like you. Eat with your mouth closed. She told me the newsman talked about Colombian neckties last night. She told me they cut open the front of your neck, yes, where an Adam’s apple goes, and then pull your tongue through the opening. She told me my father died of throat cancer, but maybe they tied off his tongue instead. Colombians do so much with tongues. The television said the guerrillas have been silencing women by slicing off tongues. She plans to do the same to me. Did you know they cut off the tongue of the Little Mermaid? My mom was always angry that I talked. But I will. I will . . . .
38. St. Petersburg, 1995. Do you remember the campground we lived at with the trees that rained down fruit? I remember walking with you and I grabbed at a tree (maybe for balance or maybe because at five years of age I grabbed at everything in my way) and when I looked at the trunk, my hand touched a snake. (The creature punctuates my memory with its darting tongue.) Concern flashed in your eyes. Did you touch a man’s private area? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? No, I chirped. You have a wart on your face. Maybe it came from when you put your face on the floor of the public shower while I showered. Or maybe . . . . Her face crumpled. Do you know how that happened? Did somebody do something bad to you? . . . . No, Mommy. Did someone do something bad to you, Ma? (I never asked this and I doubt you’d ever reply. But silence is also an answer.)
39. Miami, 1990. When you walk a busy street, always look down at the floor. But all I see is broken glass, fissured concrete, and black sidewalk bubblegum. Well then do you want to see men leer at you? Do you want to see their obscene gestures? They will give you the evil eye and make you do things you wouldn’t want to do. Do you want that? I bet you do. You are like everyone else. You will let me down. Don’t tell people about your life. They will use it against you. That’s how they are.
40. Miami, 1989. For the trailer with the hole in the floor, we rented a lot in a campground that moonlighted as a mango and lychee nut grove. Campground administration, which included Dad since he was a park attendant, forbade us from eating the lychee fruit since they were a lucrative harvest and sold to a private concern. Ma knew better. She knew my love for them and would sneak me lychees. The sweetness sustained me.
41. Take one of your front teeth, apply pressure to the nut, and pierce the fruit’s carapace. The best ones are redder than raspberries. With your fingers, shed the shell. Marvel at the flesh resembling a cataract. Plop it in your mouth. It tastes the way rose petals smell.
42. St. Petersburg, 1994. When everything soured, I reached for the sacks of sugar and the Milky Way bars and paletas de sandia stockpiled in the freezer, the mangos overripe and transcendent. I swallowed them skin and all. Do you ever dangle your nose just inches above the mango bin at Walmart to inhale the honeyed fragrance? My favorite breakfast cereal was Sugar Smacks, which, by weight, is about 56 percent sugar.
43. San Antonio, 2020. I’m on at least my fourth official lifestyle change. I’ve eliminated table sugar and almost all simple carbs other than hand fruit. Vestigial vices remain. On days of necessity, I fill a third of my mugs with artificial sweetener, even though I know it might one day kill me. I exceed the recommended maximum daily dosage. There are worse habits to have.
44. Bradenton, 1996. My body has ballooned to more than 300 pounds, and my classmates are no longer friendly. They’ve sniffed out my difference. I’m a faggot they say. They make fun of the swim trunks I wear to school because I have no other clothes. I am skipping weeks of school at a time. But I score in the 99th percentile in every area on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. Only two students at 16th Street Middle are admitted to the area’s most selective magnet school, and I am one of them. I don’t fill out the acceptance paperwork. Instead, eighth grade almost fails me. I’m too busy eating and entranced by mirages. For a quarter, I’d purchase an escape into a universe full of people who were either heroes or villains, never an inbetween. I bought the remnants, the comic books that didn’t sell the previous months, their covers slashed by Sharpies. I spend all of Ma’s tip money. Or I’d watch a facsimile of life on the 13-inch TV, the only species of technology in our home. I sit inches from the screen, staring. The TV gets a handful of alphabet soup channels: NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, the WB, UPN, PBS, and HSN (the Home Shopping Network). Instead of going to school, I spend the day flipping through hours of soaps, and when every station is on commercial break at the same time, a conspiracy of corporations, I marvel at the baubles sold on the Home Shopping Network. I want a tanzanite ring more than anything. But Ma and I have no phone and no credit card and no money.
45. St. Petersburg, 1994. Sometimes the hotel demanded that she clean 40 rooms, 25 of them checkouts, and she was so tired that she heard music. And sometimes if I walked a distance with her I would hear the music too. It was tropical-tinged, maybe Calypso, the sound of hushed celebration, the party always over there but never here.
46. Miami, 1990. You are hurting my heart. Because of separation anxiety, I tagged along to the offices and suburban homes Ma cleaned. We’d walk to the bus stop, and then we’d get off the bus and walk some more, sometimes 100 blocks at a time. I whined. She felt bad. She carried me everywhere like a porcelain doll or a good luck charm or a deadweight.
47. Greensboro, 2017. A bump grew out of her chest. It had always been there, but now it was protruding through her increasingly oversized t-shirts. I did not look. A couple weeks before I had attempted suicide. While I didn’t tell her, I was driving her home to take care of Maelstrom, my sweet husky dog, while I went away to rehab. “I’m going to a work training out of state,” I said. I tensed. She smiled and continued talking about her cancer.
48. Prescott, 2018. You never think that you will rust, that you’ll become like your parents. At rehab, I discovered my numbness. Years before, I read about a heroin addict who said opiates prevented him from feeling all of the pain he never knew he felt. I didn’t understand at the time. Pain did not reside in my body other than the occasional ankle sprain. I was doing it wrong, the counselors told me. They used clinical terms: dissociation, enmeshment, surrogate spouse, surrogate parent, covert incest, trauma bonds. They prescribed reading material: The Betrayal Bond, When He’s Married to Mom, Silently Seduced. I shook. I avoided. It was true. I had always been Ma’s only friend and her only support, and this was unfair. They told me I was angry. They handed me a therapeutic bat and gestured to a foam block and told me every day to hit it as hard as I could and yell and I shouted and I roared until the neighbors could hear and my voice rang a metal pipe.
49. Still I did not feel.
50. Austin, 2018. After her stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis, I ignored therapist recommendations and moved her from Liberty, North Carolina so that she could be closer and I could supervise her care. I bought her an RV to live in because she could not afford anything else. I gifted her my favorite husky, Koda, for emotional support and purchased more than 20 bird feeders for her to fill. Chickadees, tanagers and warblers trilled and so did she.
51. San Antonio, 2020. The managers at the next RV Park called me. The police had visited Shady Oaks Park twice. People conspired on the roof. She could hear them, she said. Fumes hissed through the vents. They tried to poison Koda, she said, and I took him away. They were manufacturing methamphetamine. They were up to something and everyone else was against her. The managers were in on it too. The managers said she yelled and pounded the walls at all hours. She could be fighting with someone they thought, but nobody was ever there. They saw her go to the tree behind the park dumpster and decipher hieroglyphics in the trunk’s wrinkles and fissures and tabulate the bark and manipulate the beads of an evanescent abacus and mutter. She was casting spells. I imagined many things. So did her neighbors. At night, she’d leave her RV and next to the playground she howled at the moon and the people on the roof and everyone else. When one of the tenants left because he was afraid of her, the RV Park said she had to go.
52. St. Petersburg Beach, 1993. I was never short on want.
25. San Antonio, 1999. My declarations of independence are ill-received, and everything is yells now. I take the quarters Ma’s been saving up for laundry. I palm them in my hand and quickly pocket them. They form a lump on the right side of my cargo shorts. I run to the payphone by the Pik-Nik. This phone says, “All long distance calls 25¢.” I pick up the receiver. This is a betrayal. I place a quarter in the slot, but it doesn’t register and the operator is demanding payment. I notice a homeless man in the Pik-Nik parking lot picking up cigarette butts and pennies. I hold the mouthpiece a little further away from my mouth. I press the knob and the coin bounces out the phone’s mouth. I try again. This time I feed the phone six quarters. It works and I get the dial tone. My fingers linger over the dialpad. But I know I don’t have any number to call. I don’t have my father’s number. He has never bothered to find me, and I have no way to find him. I don’t have my father’s number. I cry. What am I doing at the payphone? I hit the knob one more time. The phone won’t give back what I gave.
26. Homestead, 1992. I last saw my father at the tent city. He found us in the background of the evening news. He yelled at Ma until he gave up.
27. Miami, 1989. It was night and my father took a road home devoid of the lights of cars or homes, an unyielding darkness. Ma trembled with fear and screamed and dared him to stop and deposit us on the side of the road. Reverse psychology. I prepared myself to tuck and roll.
28. Dallas, 2014. I sang along to “Ultraviolence,” and smoked weed with Hector every night. He started snorting blow and leaving his mark on doors and car consoles and Xochitl, his main chick. I’d go to work and complain to my co-workers about him and how distressed I was that he might ruin his life. I did lines too because if he was doing it, I might as well. Looking back, I try to make sense, but my past self is a cipher, and I don’t have the key. There was never enough. The coke never peaked before I ran out, and after, I felt like a ghost plummeting down into a valley and then the substrate.
29. Phoenix, 1997. We fought every day. I wanted to break free. Our neighbors ignored the screams. When things got really bad, she’d scratch my arm. I’d pinch her arm back. I knew that brought back memories of her mother. When things worsened, we’d smack each other on the head. My mind would blink and then reboot. I could not contain my pain. I cratered the wall with my foot, and we left town before we paid to repair it.
30. Atlanta, 1991. His body concussed the door. Everything reverberated and trembled, including myself. Ma told me not to make noise. He would command the door to be opened. No response. He’d eventually relent. Our housing project door withstood. I never saw what he looked like. The elderly woman across the way apologized a couple times because she said it was her son and he was an alcoholic and he didn’t mean any harm. I wonder if she wanted us to open our door to him. Did she know what he was capable of? Did she hear the ferocity and primal desperation with which he attacked our door? Did she know the fear that reverberated in my seven-year-old body? That sound was Chicken Little, the sky falling down on me. We were on the second floor, and each apartment had cathedral ceilings. I remember their height because of our plan. If he ever made it through, I would open our window and shimmy the mattress on the floor through. I’d watch it land on the ground like fog descending, then jump to safety and escape to the sad gray trees abandoned by their leaves. I was fast but I worried about what would happen to Ma.
31. New York, 2012. His hand concusses the door. The booths are coffins of thin, blue-painted plywood with a monitor and a cash slot. On the screen a lingerie-clad woman who could’ve been Bettie Page stares, her eyes blank and imploring at the same time. “Put in money,” he yelled. He keeps pounding on the door until the green light above your door turns green. Bettie Page vanishes, replaced by a shirtless twink and a pizza delivery driver in an exposing uniform. Cheshire grins full of trepidation, guilt, and unbridled desire all around. A disembodied hand tries to touch you there. You let him. You glimpse a wedding band, and then back away. You don’t shutter the gloryhole as you dress. You walk out of the booth. A group of men and a yellow mop bucket wait outside. The atmosphere is somber. These men wait for a funeral to start. You wait. You escape into another booth. Undress, put yourself on display in the opposite gloryhole but look at the twink on the TV screen, his impossible muscles and organ. False urgency is an erect penis. You know that you will never have him, but you can have this. You are tugged and then embraced by a mouth. Your body takes over. You disconnect. You ejaculate. You withdraw and wipe yourself off with a coarse paper towel, pulling up the slacks you had worn hours earlier at the white shoe law firm. You hope they have not been stained by the semen on the floor. You open the booth door. You look at the floor, and you are cold.
32. St. Petersburg, 1994. The smell of the open oven baking the home because the heater won’t work, the heating coil the neon of a motel sign: No Vacancies. The smell of the oven baking your sneakers dry after your mom threw them in the tub and scrubbed all the shine away. The sneakers were falling apart at the seams. The spongy innards looked like bread.
33. Atlanta, 1991. I refused to eat at the soup kitchen. The food was cold or insipid or salty or stale, you could throw the rolls at someone and leave a dent, and the people were filthy. I didn’t use the shelter bathrooms for days because of the filth until a UTI developed, until I couldn’t pee even if I wanted to. Coins paid for a hamburger and a chocolate shake at the McDonalds across the street. But the too thick shake made me thirsty and I wanted a coke but there was no more money. I whined and I sulked and I blamed Ma because I didn’t understand poverty yet.
34. Before middle school, I tallied the number of schools I had attended: thirty. Today, I can’t vouch for the number’s accuracy. I know it was many. I’d recite the names I could remember like the alphabet: Lakewood, Woodlawn, Lakeview, West Atlanta, Mount Vernon, Avocado, Florida City . . .
35. Homestead, 1992. We had not experienced Andrew, but Ma wagered the tent city set up in the hurricane’s aftermath was a safer place for us than the housing project in Atlanta where, among other things, a man was shot downstairs. And news of hurricanes fascinated her so we posed as survivors.
36. Animals fled Metrozoo. A bison stuck in rush hour traffic. Fish walked the streets of downtown Miami. Exotic frogs bathed in washing machines. Ma worked cleanup of the Marlins stadium and rescued a stranded pancake turtle. It poked at her. Telephone poles fell like dominoes and children braved possible electrocution and braided bracelets and necklaces out of the powerline wire the color of sprinkles. The federal government had Ma sign an affidavit stating we had lied so that we were disqualified for FEMA assistance and the brand new trailers given to all of the other families, and then we left there too.
37. Miami, 1992. Don’t stick out your tongue. Do you want to be the bobo that they have turned you into? “I don’t,” I whispered. Then close your mouth. Don’t touch yourself there or you will go to hell. Did bad men do bad things to you today? Did you let them? Did you open the door to them? Is that why you are doing that? Be careful around blind people and deaf people and mute people and dwarves. They are broken and because they are broken, they will do bad things to you if you let them and then you too will break… But so will the devil. He will try to corrupt you by turning you gay and giving you HIV. He will never stop trying to corrupt you. Don’t hold your hand like that. They will think you are a sissy. Sit up straight. I don’t feel well, but if I die, what will happen to you? Why are you picking your nose? You are just like your father. You have been seeing him. I know it. How could you betray me like that? Is he going to take you away from me? You know Janet Reno took your sisters away and then I lived in a tree. When I was in the trees, I’d hear an insect that sounded like a human and I couldn’t distinguish between the two and then I couldn’t sleep. It rained. Hide in the closet. Your grandmother is at the door and she is knocking and she won’t go away. She never wanted me. She didn’t teach me how to cook. Don’t eat so much. You are going to get fat and then no one will like you. Eat with your mouth closed. She told me the newsman talked about Colombian neckties last night. She told me they cut open the front of your neck, yes, where an Adam’s apple goes, and then pull your tongue through the opening. She told me my father died of throat cancer, but maybe they tied off his tongue instead. Colombians do so much with tongues. The television said the guerrillas have been silencing women by slicing off tongues. She plans to do the same to me. Did you know they cut off the tongue of the Little Mermaid? My mom was always angry that I talked. But I will. I will . . . .
38. St. Petersburg, 1995. Do you remember the campground we lived at with the trees that rained down fruit? I remember walking with you and I grabbed at a tree (maybe for balance or maybe because at five years of age I grabbed at everything in my way) and when I looked at the trunk, my hand touched a snake. (The creature punctuates my memory with its darting tongue.) Concern flashed in your eyes. Did you touch a man’s private area? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? No, I chirped. You have a wart on your face. Maybe it came from when you put your face on the floor of the public shower while I showered. Or maybe . . . . Her face crumpled. Do you know how that happened? Did somebody do something bad to you? . . . . No, Mommy. Did someone do something bad to you, Ma? (I never asked this and I doubt you’d ever reply. But silence is also an answer.)
39. Miami, 1990. When you walk a busy street, always look down at the floor. But all I see is broken glass, fissured concrete, and black sidewalk bubblegum. Well then do you want to see men leer at you? Do you want to see their obscene gestures? They will give you the evil eye and make you do things you wouldn’t want to do. Do you want that? I bet you do. You are like everyone else. You will let me down. Don’t tell people about your life. They will use it against you. That’s how they are.
40. Miami, 1989. For the trailer with the hole in the floor, we rented a lot in a campground that moonlighted as a mango and lychee nut grove. Campground administration, which included Dad since he was a park attendant, forbade us from eating the lychee fruit since they were a lucrative harvest and sold to a private concern. Ma knew better. She knew my love for them and would sneak me lychees. The sweetness sustained me.
41. Take one of your front teeth, apply pressure to the nut, and pierce the fruit’s carapace. The best ones are redder than raspberries. With your fingers, shed the shell. Marvel at the flesh resembling a cataract. Plop it in your mouth. It tastes the way rose petals smell.
42. St. Petersburg, 1994. When everything soured, I reached for the sacks of sugar and the Milky Way bars and paletas de sandia stockpiled in the freezer, the mangos overripe and transcendent. I swallowed them skin and all. Do you ever dangle your nose just inches above the mango bin at Walmart to inhale the honeyed fragrance? My favorite breakfast cereal was Sugar Smacks, which, by weight, is about 56 percent sugar.
43. San Antonio, 2020. I’m on at least my fourth official lifestyle change. I’ve eliminated table sugar and almost all simple carbs other than hand fruit. Vestigial vices remain. On days of necessity, I fill a third of my mugs with artificial sweetener, even though I know it might one day kill me. I exceed the recommended maximum daily dosage. There are worse habits to have.
44. Bradenton, 1996. My body has ballooned to more than 300 pounds, and my classmates are no longer friendly. They’ve sniffed out my difference. I’m a faggot they say. They make fun of the swim trunks I wear to school because I have no other clothes. I am skipping weeks of school at a time. But I score in the 99th percentile in every area on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. Only two students at 16th Street Middle are admitted to the area’s most selective magnet school, and I am one of them. I don’t fill out the acceptance paperwork. Instead, eighth grade almost fails me. I’m too busy eating and entranced by mirages. For a quarter, I’d purchase an escape into a universe full of people who were either heroes or villains, never an inbetween. I bought the remnants, the comic books that didn’t sell the previous months, their covers slashed by Sharpies. I spend all of Ma’s tip money. Or I’d watch a facsimile of life on the 13-inch TV, the only species of technology in our home. I sit inches from the screen, staring. The TV gets a handful of alphabet soup channels: NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, the WB, UPN, PBS, and HSN (the Home Shopping Network). Instead of going to school, I spend the day flipping through hours of soaps, and when every station is on commercial break at the same time, a conspiracy of corporations, I marvel at the baubles sold on the Home Shopping Network. I want a tanzanite ring more than anything. But Ma and I have no phone and no credit card and no money.
45. St. Petersburg, 1994. Sometimes the hotel demanded that she clean 40 rooms, 25 of them checkouts, and she was so tired that she heard music. And sometimes if I walked a distance with her I would hear the music too. It was tropical-tinged, maybe Calypso, the sound of hushed celebration, the party always over there but never here.
46. Miami, 1990. You are hurting my heart. Because of separation anxiety, I tagged along to the offices and suburban homes Ma cleaned. We’d walk to the bus stop, and then we’d get off the bus and walk some more, sometimes 100 blocks at a time. I whined. She felt bad. She carried me everywhere like a porcelain doll or a good luck charm or a deadweight.
47. Greensboro, 2017. A bump grew out of her chest. It had always been there, but now it was protruding through her increasingly oversized t-shirts. I did not look. A couple weeks before I had attempted suicide. While I didn’t tell her, I was driving her home to take care of Maelstrom, my sweet husky dog, while I went away to rehab. “I’m going to a work training out of state,” I said. I tensed. She smiled and continued talking about her cancer.
48. Prescott, 2018. You never think that you will rust, that you’ll become like your parents. At rehab, I discovered my numbness. Years before, I read about a heroin addict who said opiates prevented him from feeling all of the pain he never knew he felt. I didn’t understand at the time. Pain did not reside in my body other than the occasional ankle sprain. I was doing it wrong, the counselors told me. They used clinical terms: dissociation, enmeshment, surrogate spouse, surrogate parent, covert incest, trauma bonds. They prescribed reading material: The Betrayal Bond, When He’s Married to Mom, Silently Seduced. I shook. I avoided. It was true. I had always been Ma’s only friend and her only support, and this was unfair. They told me I was angry. They handed me a therapeutic bat and gestured to a foam block and told me every day to hit it as hard as I could and yell and I shouted and I roared until the neighbors could hear and my voice rang a metal pipe.
49. Still I did not feel.
50. Austin, 2018. After her stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis, I ignored therapist recommendations and moved her from Liberty, North Carolina so that she could be closer and I could supervise her care. I bought her an RV to live in because she could not afford anything else. I gifted her my favorite husky, Koda, for emotional support and purchased more than 20 bird feeders for her to fill. Chickadees, tanagers and warblers trilled and so did she.
51. San Antonio, 2020. The managers at the next RV Park called me. The police had visited Shady Oaks Park twice. People conspired on the roof. She could hear them, she said. Fumes hissed through the vents. They tried to poison Koda, she said, and I took him away. They were manufacturing methamphetamine. They were up to something and everyone else was against her. The managers were in on it too. The managers said she yelled and pounded the walls at all hours. She could be fighting with someone they thought, but nobody was ever there. They saw her go to the tree behind the park dumpster and decipher hieroglyphics in the trunk’s wrinkles and fissures and tabulate the bark and manipulate the beads of an evanescent abacus and mutter. She was casting spells. I imagined many things. So did her neighbors. At night, she’d leave her RV and next to the playground she howled at the moon and the people on the roof and everyone else. When one of the tenants left because he was afraid of her, the RV Park said she had to go.
52. St. Petersburg Beach, 1993. I was never short on want.
I wanted to be a mermaid. I wanted to be Aquaman. I wanted webs between my fingers. I asked if humans could be born that way and then lamented that I wasn’t. Ma secured cleaning jobs at seaside hotels and I’d skip 4th grade to loiter in the ocean until the end of her shift. I never learned how to swim, but out there I taught myself how to float. If only I could live in the water. If only treading water was a skill. I’d sift my fingers through the wet sand, fishing out coquina clams. I felt all the colors tintinnabulate the gunmetal in my being. I raised my fingers in offering, a saltine positioned between the index and the middle. Black-masked sea gulls, aerial Zorros, dove for, snatched, absconded with the prize. Sometimes their beaks missed the cracker and sliced my cuticle, a gratifying scrape. I ran my fingers over the fishscale armor of catfish circling like a pack of wagging dogs as old, fleshy women dropped balls of Wonderbread into the water.
53. Mayapo, Colombia, 2009. I am alone on a mostly vacant beach next to a desert and a Wayuu village. I watch three Wayuu children orbit a flamingo with a broken wing. Their leash is a fishing line tied to its leg. Its feathers have dulled. It needs more shrimp, more beta carotene. I could yell at the kids and free the bird, but it’s probably too late and the sun is worshiping me and I lower my eyes and I feel the salt in the air brush my skin and I think about why did I come here and how I didn’t want to go in the water and how my life is aimless and drifts and when I look up again, they are gone.
54. Tarpon Springs, 1995. Ma was now a housekeeper at Innisbrook, a 900-acre golf resort where middle-aged, pudgy White men and giant fox squirrels cavorted. I remembered reading about Maryland’s endangered Delmarva Fox Squirrel. Did they feel lonely and friendless in their scarcity like I did when it was only Ma and I, disconnected? Did they know they were the last of their kind? My only other memories of the town were the desiccated, dark pee-yellow sponges the Greek Orthodox men left out to dry in the sun, their long beards, and a manatee who bobbed her head out of the water one evening. I imagined she sang, “Under The Sea.”
55. Ma is an onijegi and so am I. She recited my favorite childhood story like a prayer. The world left a young girl like the rain left the arroyos. Her parents were physically present. The nicest thing you could say. In their absence, she roved the streets and the canyons and the alleyways. One day, she befriended a paiche lounging in a ditch. He was a man named Anthonio trapped in a fish the size of a man. It happens, he said.
53. Mayapo, Colombia, 2009. I am alone on a mostly vacant beach next to a desert and a Wayuu village. I watch three Wayuu children orbit a flamingo with a broken wing. Their leash is a fishing line tied to its leg. Its feathers have dulled. It needs more shrimp, more beta carotene. I could yell at the kids and free the bird, but it’s probably too late and the sun is worshiping me and I lower my eyes and I feel the salt in the air brush my skin and I think about why did I come here and how I didn’t want to go in the water and how my life is aimless and drifts and when I look up again, they are gone.
54. Tarpon Springs, 1995. Ma was now a housekeeper at Innisbrook, a 900-acre golf resort where middle-aged, pudgy White men and giant fox squirrels cavorted. I remembered reading about Maryland’s endangered Delmarva Fox Squirrel. Did they feel lonely and friendless in their scarcity like I did when it was only Ma and I, disconnected? Did they know they were the last of their kind? My only other memories of the town were the desiccated, dark pee-yellow sponges the Greek Orthodox men left out to dry in the sun, their long beards, and a manatee who bobbed her head out of the water one evening. I imagined she sang, “Under The Sea.”
55. Ma is an onijegi and so am I. She recited my favorite childhood story like a prayer. The world left a young girl like the rain left the arroyos. Her parents were physically present. The nicest thing you could say. In their absence, she roved the streets and the canyons and the alleyways. One day, she befriended a paiche lounging in a ditch. He was a man named Anthonio trapped in a fish the size of a man. It happens, he said.
Every morning, she and the birds hymned his name, and he materialized, his fishscale blinking in the light. From her hands, balls of butter bread cascaded down, and he ate. These mornings became ritual, and time spilled and spurted. A boy, jealous and ugly, followed her one day, watched her melt into the reeds and sawgrass, heard her siren song, and snaked away.
Before the next dawn broke, the boy sang her song, and the fish surfaced, and the boy stabbed and gutted him. An hour passed, and a leaden fog rolled in and the girl found the shore desolate and quiet. Maybe the air was too heavy for the birds to fly but it would never be too heavy for her to sing. She crooned to no one as she waded deeper into the creek, calling out his name. A ballad stifled to a lullaby, transcending into gospel, then thundering into opera and screeching into screamo and finally, a banshee howl, and the air and the water and the body had had enough, and her lungs gave out, and her legs gave out, and she drowned, and her body translated into myth.
56. But I dream a different ending. The next time someone visited the creek, they heard the siren song, an alarming crash of sirens. Then the water red as rubies rose up and swallowed the visitor and kept rising until it washed over her parent’s home and ate the entire town.
56. But I dream a different ending. The next time someone visited the creek, they heard the siren song, an alarming crash of sirens. Then the water red as rubies rose up and swallowed the visitor and kept rising until it washed over her parent’s home and ate the entire town.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.