We have spent fourteen days in the new apartment. During the evenings, my mother stands at the kitchen counter and cuts packing tape with safety scissors. She empties boxes and begins cataloging her belongings according to their worth. She re-opens envelopes holding birthday cards, wedding invitations, notes of congratulation and bereavement, handwritten letters. Sometimes she’ll [...]
In class we read “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden. “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” reads the boy directly across from me. Then he looks up and asks, almost angrily, as though haven bitten into a rotten apple: “how can you dismantle the sun?” Some time ago I taped up a photograph of [...]
Dirección General de Tráfico suggests adding “Aa” in front of the name of one of your contacts in your phone address book. In case of an accident, whether its cause is recklessness or force majeure, use of this safety measure can quicken identification and treatment. “Aa” is an abbreviation of “Avisar a.” In English, “avisar” means [...]
At eleven thirty my mother calls my name from the living room. The rise and dip of the E resting into the guttural peace of the A, this Emma, Eeeeeeeemmaaaaaaa, Eeeehmuhhh, if anything, this name means home to me, but only ever when taken from her mouth. I go and find a room lit by a [...]
I hate the look, feel and sound of my mother’s crying. It’s not so much the implications as the act itself: ugly, rolling down in fat, butchered sweeps. She looks younger than ever when she cries, as much as twenty years younger. Perhaps I am so affected by her crying because it shows me the [...]
One of the greatest things about having a younger brother is his invariable cluelessness to all sorts of academic and everyday matters: “Who’s Hitler?” or “How do you fold a shirt?” I have the developed the habit of jabbering continually in his presence about some topic or another, and then stopping mid-way to ask “do [...]
At two o’clock in the morning my mother turns on all the lights in the house. She wipes off her shoes and shucks off her lipstick. My mother breathes like the bogeyman, leaving shell-shaped marks of perspiration on the walls. She opens a drawer to tuck in the silk grey scarf and the matching elbow-length gloves [...]
I was eight when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. During the first few months people in bars would turn their heads towards the television and say, smiles popping all gung-ho, that we’d have Hussein’s head on a stake before the year was over. I asked my father about bombs and he told me. [...]
At six o’clock Alex produces three textbooks and a roll of plastic wrap from his backpack. So far, along with a stained shirt and an equally stained friend, this is what he has managed to bring back from his first day of third grade. Following a great tradition of schoolchildhood, he offers no other answer [...]
Me: “Alex…?” Alex: “Yeah?” Me: “This is the drawing you made in school, right? The one about the Three Kings? In the Christian Bible? Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar?” Alex raises his eyebrows. I fail to see where you’re going with this. Alex: “Yes…” Me: “So why are they all black? As in dark-skinned? Aren’t Melchior [...]