By the tagged up bus bench, three Solo cups criss cross on a particle board table while men with gap-toothed smiles drink 40s and make noise about women. Underneath one cup is a canary. Me and my sisters are mesmerized as the canary flits in between the cups, which in turn flit in between themselves.
One man yells at Moms, “Oye gorda, te amo” and she scowls.
They ignore and yell, “Place your bets,” as their hands and their cups and their bird gains velocity. The bus arrives with a loud exhale.
Me and my sisters form a chorus of necessity.
“What if the birdie’s not OK?”
“Look, she’s lost a bunch of feathers.”
“No one should have to live at a bus stop.”
We recite different versions of the same thing. Over and over again.
Moms responds, “We don’t have money.” She adds, “What do you want the cat to eat it?”
We reply, “Patches wouldn’t murder a defenseless animal.”
We reply, “Why can’t we save a life and liberate her?”
We reply, “Maybe we can help her fly away.”
As they board the bus, Moms lets out a laugh clipped like wings. We look back, and the Solo cups are capsized and the bird’s gone but the men still leer.
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The cat was the girls’ idea. Like Moms says, we already have too many mouths to feed, and she already has too few hours away from the hotel to give to something else.
We live in lack, a short distance from extinction.
MariLee and Albessa discovered the cat by the sewer drain that stopped draining and brought the soaked beast home, howling. They are obsessed. Moms says Patches has to stay outside because she’s gotta be a secret because we are poor because poor people can’t have no pets because we are not about to get evicted from the projects over a dumpster cat because then the cat will go hungry and so will we because then we’ll be homeless again. She is right. We know this lecture backwards and forwards. We know it continues: “We can’t have no garden either.” Moms tried growing tomatoes and hot peppers outside, but they told her to uproot it. She always blames dumbass Anibal because he tried passing off his marijuana plants as okra. She shrugs. “Who the fuck eats okra anyway?”
But the girls act like they don’t know shit, always playing clueless, playing jacks or house, sipping on pixie sticks like doofs or bending my paper dolls until I don’t want to play with them anymore even though they are the only dolls I had because Moms says I can’t play with Barbies. MariLee and Albessa make their Barbies kiss and then look at me like bug-eyed jokers and giggle. They make origami fortune teller flowers and then ask me all sweet like to play along. No matter what color or number I choose, the outcome is always lame insults. Fortunes like: “You’re gay,” or “You’re adopted,” or “Yo Momma’s Ugly,” which I never find funny at all because we have the same Momma.
Mostly, they act like nothing’s wrong when most everything is. No one can blame Albessa. She is five and can’t talk but everyone looks at her as if one day she’s magically going to find her voice. MariLee is just annoying because she’s eight.
We are stuck at Betzabel’s, the babysitter who sounds like a bullfrog and looks worse, because Moms is busy cleaning up after lazy tourists who have come to see the Alamo. Men who return to their rooms smelling like alcohol and the fishy river. Women who discard brand new clothes like bad fruit. Moms doesn’t understand why people spend money to stay for a night under blankets that don’t get washed for months, underneath the sweat of a hundred bodies. We understand but not really why Moms has to be away all the time.
Meanwhile, the clueless ones keep acting like Betzabel is the bomb. They don’t pay attention to what is in front of them: the wilted apples and pears Betzabel hands out for lunch. Moms says Betzabel gets money from the government for babysitting, that she should be giving us real food, that we should ask for more but we are too afraid to because we know Moms can’t afford to hire anyone else.
Out front, a tree leans left and grows Minneola Tangelos. Betzabel brags that she grew it from a seed from a fruit from the store. One day, I pick one and get caught orange-handed. She coos my name, “Capi,” real sweet-like, calling me over, and says, “You can have that one but no more because they are for family.” But she has no family, no family that likes her at least, and a couple weeks later they are all on the ground, rotted and feasted on by flies.
The girls lose their ears even though Betzabel keeps talking all that shit. She says Moms needs to wash our clothes better and sew up the holes we chew into our t-shirts, says Moms needs to scold us so we stop chewing like cows; says Moms needs to learn how to scold the Betzabel way with a used fly swatter, calls my friend Gull a bad influence and laughs at the crumbs in his hair and his muskrat fragrance as she shoos him away and he calls her a fea bitch and I think it but I’m not going to say it, not even when she says Moms needs to stop changing jobs like other Momses change mans, not even when she says Moms can’t keep a job because she is loca in the head. I know better. Moms says it’s because her co-workers keep stealing her tips or her manager is like her mother who was never nice to her or the bus route got changed and now she has to walk thirty extra blocks in a neighborhood where light poles are scarce and men are fierce or she keeps seeing the hotel maintenance man everywhere and she’ll point at him coming toward us and shout that he’s a pervert and a diablo and a maricón and only then does he reverse course but the girls aren’t sure it’s always the same man.
I believe Moms. I try to avoid Betzabel. I spend more time outside. I sit on the metal slide but it’s hot and scalding. I sit on the swing set, reaching newer and newer heights until maybe I could sprout wings or die if I’m not careful, but then it screeches to a halt when Betzabel shrieks, “Can’t you see you’re sagging my swing set”? I can feel my face heating up. I retreat to a plastic playset and my body feels larger than it has ever been, too large to disappear. I dream of shrinking as I rolly polly into a ball. I stare at the tomato red plastic until I hear Betzabel shrieking again, “Can’t you see you’re sagging the plastic, you dumb fatso.”
I throw a moldy tangelo at her dumb face, and a maggot slips down her cheek like a tear. All of us stay silent for the rest of the day until she tells Moms, “I don’t watch juvenile delinquents. Your children are no longer welcome here,” and everything turns into shouts, and I feel bad for a second but only a second because I also know this is my independence day.
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Technically, when Moms away, I’m supposed to watch the girls, and they’re supposed to listen to me, but we don’t do either. The girls stay being loud playing hopscotch like disabled pigeons. I leave Patches to supervise them. Gull and I huddle on the bed admiring the panels of comic books like Speed Demon. Siliconman’s under the spell of the Night Spectre, but the Two-Faced Goblin’s pumpkin bomb turns Siliconman into glass, and he shatters like firecrackers. Our imaginations oohing and ahhing until the girls come at us, Albessa holding a piece of hive and a dead bee with two fingers. I stare at the geometry of the honeycomb. I try not to smell the bee’s scent of rained-on cardboard.
“Do you think it’s a killer bee?”
“No, MariLee.”
“Where do you think it hides its honey?”
“None of your buzzness. Get it?”
Gull and I yell, “buzz buzz buzz,” and roll out the door and laugh and laugh and laugh.
Outside, we move our bodies to the music of tomcats Mortal Kombating and minivan sound systems bumping like 808s and the ice cream truck Yankee Doodling and gunshots celebrating a new year. Above us, the fuseboxes talk to each other in code, and the powerlines swoop down, wires tentacling into roofs, wires sporting a pair of kicks newer than anything we own. We sprint to the wrought iron fence that protects the apartments from them, them being the men who sleep and bidi bidi bum bum in the alcove above the big river. Moms warns that the men down there do bad things and to stay far away.
I ask Gull, “Do you think they do bad things to each other?” but Gull says nothing and then we pretend nothing was said; instead, we mime being in prison, attempting to shake the fence metal but nothing budges.
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Lately, every time Moms comes home, she arrives with less. Work is subtracting her. I try to decipher a pattern and solve the puzzle. All I know is she takes the bus to the Riverwalk but doesn’t go to the river. All I know is her hands are fossils splitting at the seams from too much Clorox and Lysol and CLR. All I know is she’s been systematically going down the downtown hotel skyline. All I know is she’s been hired and fired so many times and sometimes she worries that once she runs out of hotels to work at we’ll run out of money. All I know is she’s housekept at Homewood Suites to afford our home, at Residence Inn while she was still waiting on her residence card, at Holiday Inn where she couldn’t take off holidays during “peak season,” at Comfort Suites where her boss told her, “Don’t get too comfortable, Rosalinda!” at Relax Inn that was anything but.
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We tell our Momses we love them just in case, which makes them forget for at least a second our cyclone nature, then we get on with our day. We get in good trouble, bad trouble. We rinse and repeat. We chase cats and chickens. We hunt anoles, our hands longing for connection. We marvel at the severed tails twitching. We feed dogs and a dog parade runs alongside us, the lineup always changing because strays never stay. We don’t give them names. We try not to catch feelings.
Some days, we join the company of birds. It’s funny feeding seagulls with Gull, laughing at the reverb of words, of life. Outside the panaderia, we, the dynamic duo, hoist the big bags of day olds on to our shoulders. The elephant ears and conchas, speckled white and green, reek of sugar and yeast, an ancient kingdom odor. It doesn’t bother the birds. Food is food. We don’t know where the birds come from. Birds are birds. We’re three hours away from any sea.
We don’t care. We have something no one else has. Our minds turn the grey dirt into white sand. Blue the black sewer water. Salt the air molecules. We lick our lips, savoring. Hold up a pedazo of sweetbread with two fingers. A Zorro-masked gull swoops down and misses, repeats until its prey is caught. His friends join in. Bird noise rains down. We hold up another and another until a couple of our fingers are bleeding because the birds’ aims are wonky. Or maybe they aren’t. Maybe the beaks are teaching us an important lesson: you hurt the ones that love you.
We don’t care. We move on. We dodge potholes and the leering stares of creepers. We play doctor. We play nurse. We devour cherry raspas and when our mouths and teeth are good and dripping with red, we transform into vampires and wrestle and neck and bite. We eat pan dulce until our stomachs hurt and then we eat more. When it rains, we splash puddles. When it doesn’t, we kick rocks. We marker our territory. We scrutinize the writing on the walls and the phone poles. We use up our Momses’ laundry quarters to call all the numbers promising us “good times” and “BJs.” If a woman answers and asks our age, we hang up. If a man answers, we laugh and hang up. If we can’t tell, we play along. We beg our Momses for more coins. We run out of laundry quarters. My Moms stops washing, and then my sisters and I have only dirty clothes. Gull’s Moms pinches him so hard that he says he heard a cash register ding and, in that moment, could’ve sworn that he was Sonic and all of his coins were sprinkling out and showering the linoleum.
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Cicadas scream, and Gull races after alley cats, and I race after him, and the Chow Chow mix who lives by the Panaderia who lives everywhere races after us, barking and baring teeth. “She’s going to give away our location,” barks Gull. We don’t really know what we are hiding from but we hide in the bamboo forest even though you can’t really hide in a bamboo forest. We hide in the house where the old lady lived before she died of old ladyness. We hide under the bridge and on top of milkweed and used condoms and Swisher Sweets wrappers. We escape the dog but not the biting biting biting fire ants. Everything is extra hungry because of drought. We pick them off one by one. Later, we pick ourselves raw. It’s the price of our invisibility.
In that solitude, flocks of birds halo around us and wildflowers tilt their brilliant heads at us, while Gull makes paper planes out of notebook paper, then crashes them in the tall grass; he draws fanged tigers and wispy flamingos and short-haired Aquamen with pecs like extra ripe fruit about to burst. I like to watch him sketch, his laser eyes etching into the Five Star Notebook, his fingers flicking pillbugs and clingy dead grass. Lately, he’s been drawing more NC-17: cops shooting dudes in the head, Jessica Rabbit with nipples like bullets, cyclopes butt fucking robots while a dripping pervy Mickey Mouse watches. When he finishes that last drawing, he says, “One of them could be us,” but then he laughs and says, “Just keeding,” and I laugh too but not really.
More than anything, he draws dicks. Some have balls dangling like stalactites with hair like cactus spines, some are all rod, others, just the tip, uncut and cut, with throbbing veins or smooth like butter, ejaculating and semi-chubbed, dicks with sombreros and baseball caps, wielding javelins and sporting tusks, swerving to the left and to the right and to the upper and to the lower registers and to all degrees of latitude and longitude, baldheaded dicks and wigheaded dicks, one dick that snatches the weave of another dick in obvious agony and weeping droplets that don’t resemble jizz, dicks with arms and tails and wings that extend across the 11 inches of page on to the next page that’s how enormous they are, dicks that are bananas and carrots with eyes and dicks that are dicks.
When he’s done, Gull gifts me the drawings, and then I fold them as much as they’ll fold and take them out at night, imagining my lips slipping down a shaft.
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Mouths have to eat, and the hands of me and the girls dance through the everything-is-half-off clearance bin at the salvage store, sorting through irregular undies and gashed body spray cans and cratered Fancy Feast and sardine tins. Moms palms a tin, says “Dents only bug white people.”
Next to the store is the bus stop and behind that the Butterkrust shop. Everything smells like warmth and bread until the arrival of the bus, shuddering and spewing hot, black air. Each of us has at least two bags per hand. I have four in each hand because I am stronger than they are. Moms used to carry more but she can’t anymore and she won’t tell what is wrong.
The farebox clink-clanks. Every bus seat is taken even the ones that face each other and make Moms and I dizzy, and all four of us stand and surf, and the bus is a bull stopping, jolting, exploding, charging, bucking. I tell the girls, “Ride the bus. Ride the bull. Ride the wave.” The floor is flat but shaky and no matter where we stand, the bull tries to knock us down. A couple bags have holes and the Grape Fabuluso and Mrs. Butterworth play peekaboo and contemplate jailbreak. The metal pole is out of reach. I wish I had a third hand or a prehensile tail. We attempt to evenly yoke the bags to achieve balance. But still Moms’s feet skip, and she nearly crashes flylike into the windshield. Soda cans flee MariLee’s bags, spilling across all lanes of the floor, and I run after each of them. One can geysers and sprays an old lady’s leg, and we pretend it didn’t and escape to the back of the bus, where the engine roars and cooks and the air is an ocean too warm and the heat reveals the smell of ass in the seat fabric and I am getting seasick, but I hold it in until our stop.
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Gull and me meet under the cover of rambling rosebuds. Two bodies crescendoing as wilting blooms the color of blood in tubes watch. Two bodies shivering. People say love is goosebumps. I think it’s fever and frost.
Gull’s hands like nervous rabbits cross distances, across my ridged breastbones, the burial mounds above my chest cavity, the cordillera of my ribs, my abdominal Great Plains, my treasure trail, then my cargo shorts’ elastic band. Innocent stuff. Mostly.
But then voices cleave the air. We can’t leave the safety of thorns or see past them. I see Gull’s forehead wrinkling, doing math, calculating the cost of being found. At school, the boys call us faggots; we call them back faggots but we don’t know the meaning. We know that liking each other is like a disease, we could get a disease, we could die from a disease, a disease you can’t get from sharing straws or kissing school said, only from love, and once we get infected nobody is gonna wanna talk to us, and behind our backs and sometimes to our faces we know they’ll call us dirty lowlives devils freaks pedos pervs scum of the earth sickos no good for nothings.
The voices are close and too familiar. Betzabel is yammering on and on to Gull’s Dads. “Those two are like a fingernail and dirt,” she’s saying.
I don’t have a Dads. Once I went through Moms’s purse and way at the bottom was my birth certificate and under father it said John Doe, and I know that John Doe is a nobody. Most of us around here don’t have dads and the ones that do like Gull make it seem like no one’s missing out on much. A few weeks back, his Dads got out on paper and moved back in but he’s already methed out on the daily, wilting like a corn husk in the trash.
Wafts of argument skitter on the breeze. Betzabel rapid-fire roars.
“It’s unnatural for boys to spend that much time together.”
“He’s corrupting your son.”
“Maybe the two of them are in love.”
That’s when we hear the word, “No!” A word, so loud, so sonic boom large, we can almost see it in front of us, bubble-lettered. Next, we hear Gulls’ Dads’ open handed thunderclap. Later, for a week, Betzabel wears his fingers on her face. Later, so does Gull.
But just then, in our rosebud hideaway, the two of us are still choking on the fear of what we are. We wait it out, then separate from each other and the bushes and the rotten perfume of roses.
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When I get home, I shower. I discard the day, absolve myself. I feel good because, here, I know I can do no wrong. I know this because I’m named Capistrano, after a beautiful city of beautiful birds, a place Moms has never seen in person. I know this because she doesn’t even bother to explain the names of the terrible two and because even though Moms says I am a healthy weight, she always puts in my brown bag an extra sandwich, either tuna or rice or PB&J; she knows the school’s free lunch is half-cardboard, half-saltine pizza and limp fries.
Moms says I need to eat and become strong. She sizes up my size, says I’ll be handsome in no time. I pretend I don’t like compliments. The girls complain and I stick my tongue out at them and Moms pretends she has no eyes. Unlike them, I sleep in the same bed as Moms. Sometimes MariLee makes fun of me because she feels grown having her own bedroom with Albessa, but I tell her to shut her crying crybaby mouth.
It’s different for me. For the first five years of my life, Moms carried me everywhere because people without a car have to walk. She’d say, “you are hurting my heart,” but she still held me like a teddy bear. She carried me until she started falling down, and I’d worry that maybe she had bird bones, that maybe she might break. I began using my legs. That way I got used to being without.
But now things have changed. Now, Moms fills our plates from sea to shining sea so much so that sometimes we slouch on the couch and sauce or soup spills onto our shirts, and Moms yells that we only have so many.
“Bleach don’t bleach everything,” she says.
As she cleans up, I prepare a meal. Even though Patches is not my cat, the girls always forget so I save some bones and fat and set out the leftovers.
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The letter from Kaleidoscope Clearing House marked “Personal and Confidential” screams, “IT’S DOWN TO A 2-PERSON RACE FOR $2,000. YOU & ONE OTHER PERSON WERE ISSUED THE WINNING NUMBER. WHOEVER RETURNS IT FIRST WINS IT ALL!” Moms returns it immediately in the enclosed self-addressed stamped envelope, receives a check for $1,000 six weeks later, and now everyone believes in God.
We always have items on layaway at Sears. We always have a wish list. The money slips away like water from the tap. Each dollar is promised and assigned before Moms even gets to the Western Union. She pays back her sisters for paying the power company for not killing our lights. She buys me ninja turtles and Justice League action figures, which I never take out of their packages, their homes, and Justice League comic books, which I devour, and she buys the girls five different Black Barbies, which eventually I mop. Moms calls 1-800-99JENNY and buys a lifestyle change.
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Before the rooster crows, Moms glides across the vinyl rosettes to the rhythm of merengue, mopping them spic ‘n span. The songs remind her of the home she ran away from. Her hands grip the mop loosely. Her knees dip slightly. Her legs pick up the pace as she sweeps and shuffles side to side. Maybe this is how her days go too, cleaning and longing for a place she says she never wants to return to. We pretend to be sleeping as we watch this secret Moms. The volume’s low but the syncopated guira and horn blasts baila con el aire. We join her, then we are all shuffling and bumping into each other, and my dance partner is a toy rifle and MariLee’s is a toy broom, and Albessa’s is a rolling pin that doesn’t touch the floor but she holds it out in front of her regardless.
I breathe in my favorite smell: the Murphy’s Oil that gives the floor its shine. Then the dance ends and Moms hangs bed sheets and pillowcases on the clotheslines like masterpiece paintings. She goes inside and sits in the one living room chair they have. She presses wildflowers that she’s plucked from the yard, Indian blanket and primrose and bluebonnet. She flattens them inside romance novels so that every turn of every page is a surprise.
Our best days are Sundays because that’s when the tourists check out and leave big tips. Moms works late, restoring each room to its original condition so that people can pretend no one else stayed there. Sometimes waiting for her to come home is like the best episode of a TV show. On lucky days, we spend the evenings talking about the kind businessman who left her a $50 tip, us wishing we could thank him for making Moms a little happier, us wishing, but not saying, that he could be our Dads.
For a while, life is more livable.
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Gull and me talk less and make out more. His tongue and his hands insist too much and I relent but eventually, we get bored of that too. Instead, we play the slap game. Warmth leaks from Gull’s hands on to mine, like he’s a revved up engine, his fingers fluttering over my tickled palm. I always lose this game. He always slaps too hard, and I protest, and his face scrunches and storms.
And then we stop. We start going over to Gull’s friends’ house. Shazam and Johnny have a/c. They are brothers but resemble sparrows. Because they don’t have any other DVDs, we watch Aladdin 3 for the third time, sipping on lean like Kool-Aid. I’m obsessed with Midas’ hand and the concept of alchemy. I’m not big on cough syrup, but when I taste it, I go floating and then it’s not too bad. I dream that it heliums my insides. When I start to come down, we are in the street, skipping over potholes, and Gull is still up and talking about witchcraft. He fishes a marble out of his cargo pockets. One with a sliver of orange. He’s delivering a lecture.
He holds his hand out, says all serious like, “Keep this with you forever to guard against bad spirits. Like your sisters.” And them three bust out in bird laughter.
Gull says he got it from Nanci, la bruja who lives a couple blocks away in a garden shed in back of an empty house, and she said it was muy powerful
I say, “Man, if it is so powerful, why doesn’t Nanci live in a mansion or at least in a house?” I toss it into the sewer drain and Gull and his friends look at me with their bird faces like I’m the crazy one.
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Gull, the sparrow brothers, and me play Donkey Kong Country 2. I always select Dixie Kong. I like how her ponytail helicopters across the screen, slicing through the virtual air. I like the combo of the Barbie pink and her banana yellow hair. I wish that was my uniform always. I’m tired of this black-brown-beige-white world.
I keep dying even though I want to live. I never get to face the final boss. My hands don’t work fast like the others. I curse them. Eventually, the bird brothers stop calling me up to play and it’s just them and Gull fingering the controllers, and Gull pretends he doesn’t notice a thing, pretends he doesn’t see me shrink on the couch, chatter extra hard even though my words are met mostly with silence because they’re so focused on the game. Every time they hurl a barrel at a baddie, it feels like they are hurling a barrel at me. I feel more and more alone. After half an hour of this, I say, “I gotta go,” and Gull says, “naw, stay,” but his eyes don’t meet mines and before he can say something else, I’m good and I’m gone.
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Gull stops coming around. Now, I’m stuck at home, watching Pamela Anderson sprint across a brilliant white sand beach. She is a curvy stoplight, and I’m bored and sad. I need to give my body something to do so I yell, “Food!” In seconds, Moms hands me a full plate of these big bootied grapes. Moms has started eating a lot less. She’s been giving me bonus portions. MariLee won’t eat much either. “I’ve got to watch my figure,” she says as she struts across the cracked linoleum and trips into the wall and I laugh.
Albessa is doing what MariLee is doing who is doing what Moms is doing. They are all worshiping at the altar of Jenny Craig and Suzanne Somers and Jessica Simpson and all of these blonde women, who think less is more.
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They say bad things come in three but it’s really multiples of fives and tens. You know the way that video games get harder before you get killed off and have to start all over at the beginning?
The Authority sends us a letter about new homes they hope to create on top of our home. They attach a 90-day notice to vacate. Our brand new air-conditioner wimps out and we have to sleep with the windows open and the lightning bugs get in and I fall asleep watching fireworks. Patches has been extra needy lately, mewling constantly, but all I want to do is stay in bed. Molly keeps losing her chance at love with Holden on As The World Turns, and I can’t stop watching and telling Moms to get me apples to eat. Like that, I run through two bags, a dozen apples each, and I marvel at my appetite. Maybe one day soon I could make money at one of them food eating contests. I brag about it the next day at school because apple annihilation feels like a superpower but I only get crickets.
Our food stamps get cut off because Moms didn’t report the sweepstakes winnings. Didn’t know she had to. Then Moms comes home with a literal pink slip. This time, the hotel’s downsizing they say. They need less people to do more work basically. To get to the food bank, we take three buses, and the white ladies there hand out mostly garbage: too many cans of diced pears, Muenster cheese with too much rind, instant mashed potatoes that taste like newspaper in a blender but heated up, grits that taste the same, powdered milk, vegetables that nobody wants, baby food (but we are not infants any more), tins of government pork with white labels that say, “PORK IN JUICES” and are decorated with a crude drawing of a pig, bacon-wrapped steak circles past the expiration date. Nobody wants to eat much anymore, but I still do. Moms and the girls are turning orange because all they eat are carrots.
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We divide the Sunday news. The girls take the comics section, and I confiscate the help wanted ads. I pink highlighter all of the housekeeping jobs while MariLee cries that I’ve taken the one good marker and I flash my smile and remind her I have teeth and that she should shut the fuck up. I fan out the bus schedules like playing cards, writing down directions, making sure Moms can get to where she might be going.
Because we have to eat, I snag the coupons and scissors and clip clip clip. We try out new items depending on the discounts that week. My hands tremble too much and I hate the coupons’ jagged lines. Sometimes the coupons tear in half and then Moms has to sweet talk the cashier into taking them but they always do, you just have to ask real nice.
Sometimes I skip to the real estate section of the classifieds and circle homes for sale and first-time homebuyer programs because I dream of a forever place with a huge backyard for me and Gull and Patches even though I know the sellers all want Moms to have at least one year of steady employment, which she never does, but I don’t give up. One day, she might and I’ll be ready.
When I’m done with the research, I poke Moms on the shoulder, tell her to go to the payphone, and make calls so that we might keep this home.
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The white of Patches’ eye expands from a tiny isosceles triangle to a crescent to a pie slice to a half moon. Her eye boogers darken and dilate. She walks slower and lays down more, and she smells like sewer water. Sometimes, foul-smelling streaks of brown trail behind her. More and more the mop is less and less lonely and the air too. Moms keeps screaming that she should stay outside until Patches shrinks even more, scratching at herself like she’s tired of having skin, and then one day she disappears.
The girls beg me to find her. I know it’s no use. Moms says that cats when they go to die, they hide. She says they prefer a solitary death. I launch a manhunt anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I interrogate the backyard, the clothesline, Gull and the sparrow brothers selling cigarettes at the bus stop, the fig tree, the chickens that the neighbors whisper have rabies because they feast on barbecue scraps and their own chicks, the phone poles and their Missing and For Sale and Fa$t Ca$h signs, the lantana and the crabgrass, the army ants and the sandspurs, but no one knows her whereabouts, and I retreat home with emptiness and the girls hole up in their room, crying the entire weekend.
The next day, I fill an empty pickles jar with ants and anthill dirt. I take a fork and poke holes in the jar’s lid, watching as the ants tunnel and dance and create labyrinths and castles and fortresses. I supply them with grains of sugar and rice and whole sugar cubes, and they disappear everything until one day they disappear themselves, and I’m alone again.
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I need to extinguish nervous energy. I trapeze across the jungle gym, performing tricks in front of an audience, executing dares to applause and laughs. Gull’s there, smiling a wide bucktooth smile. Maybe he’s happy to see me. Maybe he misses me. But then smiles elongate into jeers. Gull points at me, at the back of my head. I sense an escalation of noise, a murder of laughs arrowing, crows and sparrows flying out of mouths and assailing the air. I hear Gull call me names: “Bughead,” and “The Hive.” My free hand touches the back of his hair. I find a half dollar-sized lump of wax, a kind of nest. I examine it in my palm, it’s the color of bad meat, then my other hand comes off and then my limbs because they have a mind of their own and I fall on my ass and I can hear a roar of laughter and no one helps me up and I am dazed and my fingers tear at the hive and slip it in my mouth I don’t know why and the crowd goes, “Ewww” and I realize the gravity of things and start to cry and I feel heat surge to my eyes and I see Gull pointing at me and so are his bird friends and I pounce on the motherfucker and the crowd is yelling, “Fight, Fight,” and I keep bashing in his face and I am yelling, “Fuck you faggot” over and over again and Gull is not even fighting back and he almost looks peaceful, which makes me even more mad and my fists keep raining down until my hands are wet and slick until teachers pull us apart and help Gull and I fight them off too and I hear the static screech and the walkie talkie crackle but I’m ready for whatever is coming my way even if it’s six cops even when they pin me down by my arms and my legs and both sides of my hips and they squeeze my arms and twist them and pull them behind me and I realize I’m powerless, the handcuffs click and they still have twelve hands on me and they move me like that, like livestock, like mummies in the movies, delivering me to the cop car, pushing my head down, shoving me inside.
I smell iron. I look at my hands covered in the rust of the jungle gym and the dried blood of my former friend. They keep me in the car forever. Now I’m a bird in their cage.
They drive me home. They make a report. Through the grate screen, I watch the back of their corrugated heads, fat with too much dairy. When the older one laughs like drowning, dandruff flakes fly. The cop car paints my block American flag colors. Moms looks scared and then sad and then angry and then so small as she stands in her floral Walmart nightgown next to the two cops wearing sunglasses so you can’t see their eyeballs glaring. She barks, “What did he do now?”
They talk about how three teachers and probably Gull’s whacked out parents are going to press assault charges. “But he’s just a baby!” she says and I can see her fists ball up and I wonder if she’ll swing at them or at me but she doesn’t do either. I feel like the sorriest piece of shit. I feel like everything is going to end because of me.
And then they leave, handing Moms a stack of paperwork.
◆
It’s hard to know when too bad won’t get better.
The next day is Saturday, and there are three knocks on the door, and it’s some old, bougie lady in bright church clothes. I block her entrance and don’t respond to her greeting. I mad-dog her, until she says, “Can I speak to your mother?” and I turn sideways and Moms is on the couch, waiting, like she’s been expecting this, and her hands wave at the woman but then dip too quickly.
She introduces herself as Ms. Cook, a caseworker from Child Protective Services. She hands Moms a business card. She tells Moms, “I’m here because your son got into a serious physical altercation at school yesterday, and we’d like to see how we can provide assistance to your family.” She swallows her lips and asks Moms for a glass of water, who obeys and when she comes back, Ms. Cook points at me like a witch and says, “Nobody wants to see that young man end up a felon,” and Ms. Cook smiles, and the girls smile like the dopes they are and Moms smiles but not really.
This lady has a zillion questions and pages of checklists to complete. I bounce around and try to read over her shoulder. “Lack of Hygiene” and “Neglect” have been circled. MariLee and Albessa are performing, trying to get her to like them but instead she looks at them with wolf eyes and asks, “Have you girls been eating?” MariLee says nothing. She is starstruck or some shit. Ms. Cook asks the same question of Moms, who says, “Yes, everyone has been eating” but she doesn’t sound super certain. Ms. Cook gets up and examines the bookcases and places her finger on the shelves and then looks at her smudgy finger and writes that down too. She flips through a book and dead flowers litter the floor. She keeps writing. She keeps trying to ask questions of Albessa, who can’t respond and hides her face instead.
“Don’t you see that’s the way she fucking is?” I bark. The lady’s claw of a hand is strangling her pencil now.
I tell her, “Why don’t you mind your fucking business?” and the lady’s hand frenzies and her words sprawl wild across her checklist, looking like tiny roaches.
She says, “Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?” and I reply, “Do you talk to your mother with that face?”
She ignores me, says to Moms, who doesn’t know how to respond, “It might help him to learn consequences.”
Ms. Cook gets on the phone. The only one who has a Dads is MariLee. Ms. Cook calls Jaimito, she recites their address, and everyone can hear Jaimito yelling over the phone as she tells him what she thinks is going on and then Ms. Cook leaves because she knows what’s coming down the pike.
Jaimito’s knocks are thunderclaps on the door and Moms lets him in and he shoves her until she falls on the stairs while he screams, “I knew I should never have left her with you” and “look how fucking skinny the girls are” and “are you on some fucking drugs?” and “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and he’s cursing and yelling and MariLee and Albessa are shrieking and crying and I’m frozen with the knowledge that all of this is my fault and once I’d done what I did, I can’t stop anything that happens after and Moms is terrified and she runs upstairs and we hear the bedroom door lock and MariLee screams, “Moms!” and I know that my sister doesn’t want to leave but we all know it’s too late for her to stay, and he takes her away howling like cats in the dark.
◆
Something happens, and something breaks. Moms and Albessa never leave the house again. They skip the kitchen and orbit around the television, the bathroom, and sleep. I switch places with Albessa and sleep alone like a “big boy should.” No one talks about Marilee who is rumored to have been stolen across state lines. They’re all acting like she is forever lost, like she is a never-was.
When Moms looks at me, I don’t see light in her eyes. She tells me, “If I die, what is going to happen to you?” and I get up and head for the kitchen. Maybe in the bodies she lost she lost herself, killed off the best parts of her, but there’s no time to think about that now. The pilot light is out. I jump on the counter and search the cupboards above the fridge for ingredients. I only find bags of sugar. Decomposing inside the fridge is bread and margarine. I know they need something sweet, so I slather margarine on the bread and sprinkle sugar on top of it and I hand slices to them like that and they eat and I eat and this is the best tasting bread I’ve ever had and I think everything is going to be OK as long as we have bread.
◆
I stay home, consult the comic books. Moms consults the doctors about the shrinking on her vertical axis. They stab her with syringes and questions. “There’s nothing medically wrong,” they say. “You just need to eat.” They point to a food pyramid like it has all of the answers.
She nods, but still refuses nutrition. She stops going to appointments even when I remind her. She says, “They don’t help poor people.”
Meanwhile, I study up on Plastic Man, Changeling, Shrinking Violet, Metamorpho, Elasti-Girl, Mister Fantastic, Skin. Comic books use shapeshifters for comic relief, but there’s nothing funny here. I study panels where Elongated Man’s eyeballs pop out and whirl through the air on stalks of optic nerves, his shoulder blades protruding and escaping his flesh, thwacking gun-toting baddies in the face, his hair morphing into strangling tentacles.
This, I think. This is what the future will look like.
◆
Watch Looney Tunes and see the Tasmanian Devil cook the sole of a shoe. Fantasize about how your sneakers might taste. Chase the chickens and save up the free lunches and harvest the figs and the prickly pears and get pricked and tweeze tweeze tweeze and nab the bagel seconds from the panaderia that the Chow mix protects with her jaws and barely get away with your life. Consider hitting her with a shovel. Imagine the heavy sound and contemplate whether dog meat is tender. Watch how the beast wags her tail when the laundromat owner comes out and plays keep away with a broom and reconsider.
Run into Gull, who is sparrow-less and looking busy scanning the Pik-Nik parking lot for coins. His eyes register you and he makes to run. Wave at him. Put your hands up. Show no harm.
Ask, “What did you do when your Dads starting losing pounds?” Watch Gull shrug and walk away. Wish to go back in time.
But don’t lose your appetite for hope. Eat dirt, paint chips, the flattened black sidewalk bubblegum, snails, the skin around your fingernails, scabs. Eat the world. Savor the tang of loneliness and swallow.
Nothing tastes too bad now.
•
Ribs and tetas melt away. Moms is vanilla wafer thin. Then she is oblea thin. And so is Albessa. Color and sinew drain from their bodies. They are desiccating. Their circumferences tighten, and they lose dimension.
One day, she asks me to Elmer-glue together the hands of her and Albessa. Says she doesn’t want to lose her baby. They sit unmoving on the couch, their bodies creased at their knees and their waist, their searching eyes watching the soaps. They say in unison, “Don’t turn off the TV,” and I fall asleep to the mumble of juicer infomercials and thoughts of could it be like this forever.
And then another day, before I know it, the screen door’s call and response smacks. My world is outside, and I run. Maybe Moms and Albessa are craving air and light but I don’t think so. The forecast calls for rain.
The wind picks up. The wind picks them up. The wind picks up. Their bodies dancing in the air like leaves with the leaves. Like feathers. I can’t think or act or speak fast enough. They are both blank-faced, singing the chorus from “Maria Se Fue” as they twirl.
They gain altitude. I give chase, jumping over the rosebushes, the curb, the too-big pothole, a stroller with a baby in it, a pigeon. I shout, “Moms!” Over and over again. I shout, “Come back to me!” The neighborhood acts like no one has eyes or ears. I can’t hear their song anymore but they keep going up and up, runaway kites looking for a home. I cross the bridge over the dead river. I cross the busy road, cars honking, wanting me out of the way. I cross myself hope to die. The train is running. I hear the exhaust of its sadness. I can’t cross. I can’t run and run and run until they decide to come back down. They become a point on the horizon, but every night, I still search the sky for the right constellation: an outline of Moms because she was my star.