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 [...]
Seven days after my seventeenth birthday, April 11th of this very year, my childhood came to an end. At the time I would’ve have perhaps have said something as dramatic as “my childhood died”. But please don’t think too badly of me for it. It sure felt like death, then. My greatest fear is that [...]
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 [...]
And so I am home and camp was a million different kinds of brilliant, and star-gazing in a waterless lake and falling hard and fast and mad in love with writing, all over again. But I am home again, and I’ve to work. In fact, today was the first day of my summer internship, and [...]
On the way back from Tarragona, my mother informs the rest of the car that she wants to buy tomatoes. Her body is built into, but not limited to, the space of the driver’s seat. In quantum physics, observing an object changes it, due to the instruments used in observation. How can we know anything, [...]
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 [...]
When I walk into my room I see it as a secret base: a screwdriver for when she locks herself in the bathroom, a phone with a doctor on speed dial, several packs of Kleenex, a box of medication underneath my photo albums. It is odd to be keeping the medication of one’s mother underneath [...]