The New World

I believe that my mother thought of killing me and my twin many times. One day when we arrived home from school, a chair in the living room was on fire. The big chair was one nobody really sat in—our living room was reserved for guests, which were rarely had. The plastic cover of the chair had melted half-away, looking, I thought, like a dropped egg. What a conundrum, I remember thinking, feeling lucky to have the word, before calling out to see if our mother was home. Our white cat Zero came from the kitchen into the threshold of the hall, then turned and walked away. As if nothing was on fire. Or, as if things were always on fire, and that was how we lived. We had learned the word that day in school: conundrum…. it rolled in my mouth like the stale florescent butterscotch candies in the entryway of our grandmother’s nursing home. I see now that it didn't really apply to the situation.

As Luck Would Have It

An allergic reaction from an antibiotic crawls into your ankles, your calves, your immune system flying its sheath of pale scarlet. Arriving in Mexico City, you can walk but feel unable to stand still, pain shooting through your joints, through the muscles behind your knees. There is a taxi to a dark room. X brings elote en vaso to the bedside, and it turns your stomach. X – for the man you will call sometimes, with a kind of splintered smile, your “married boyfriend.” You dream of television vampires, how when they cry, their tears are composed of blood. The next day, you are able to walk, your vision like Vaseline smeared over a pane of glass. X brings you to a swath of ruins, now housed in a museum. You will remember nothing of the ruins. Once during a mild disagreement, X left the room and switched off the overhead light as he left. You sat in only streetlight, obscured behind a tall potted cactus on the window frame. Years later, towards the end of the affair, you took a beautifully framed poem off the wall beside the bed in his second apartment, the one you sometimes lived in, and hung a half sand dollar on the nail in its place. Sleeping beside the poem had turned into a cruel joke you only now understood. Femininity is a sickness, went the poem.