By Felisha Flores–

Paco was rummaging through the old dresser to clean everything out.  Lipsticks, clothes, magazines, even an empty can of spray paint were among its contents.  Most peculiar was a folded piece of paper that fell out from in between the pages of one of his old Lowrider magazines.  It was addressed to Roja in Lisa’s writing:

Mi Amiga, Mi Amor, Roja,

I am writing this letter to you because you are gone, and I miss you.  I know you will be back soon, but I realized this is the first time in our lives, since the first day of kindergarten when we met, that we have been away from each other.  Except for the day you missed school back in fourth grade to go to your tio’s funeral.  I pretended like I was sick and went to the nurse’s office first thing in the morning.

She sent me back after an hour because nothing was wrong with me, but I went back on my own again during lunch.  I had to, I had no one else to sit with or talk to.  I never told you that because I wanted you to think I was like Laura; tough.  Well I’m not like my sister at all.  She leaves people and never looks back.  She doesn’t even care about me or my brothers anymore.

Speaking of brothers, Paco misses you more than I do. I didn’t think it was possible but all he does is mope around the house and clean his stupid truck.  There are a lot of things I’ve never told you.  So I’ll go ahead and tell you some now since I’m never going to give you this letter anyway.

Remember when I first saw you?  I wanted to be you.  You looked so clean in your dress and braided hair.  You were so pretty even then, even for a five year old.  I wanted to claim you first as my friend before anybody else did.  I knew you were going to be something great.  Something everyone else would want, and I’d be able to say you were mine.

Remember when we got into that fight at the car show and you dented Paco’s fender trying to protect me from the other Cholas?  I never told you I saw him rubbing the dent the next day and shaking his head while smiling.  At that moment I knew that no matter what you did, Paco would never be angry with you…
Paco didn’t finish reading the rest of the letter.  His eyes were blurred from the water starting to surface in them.  That last sentence stung.  It hurt to think about the way he treated Roja last time he saw her.  If Lisa was there to witness it, she would have taken back those words and Paco would probably have a black eye from her or something worse.

Paco realized Lisa must have written the letter when Roja was in Europe with her grandparents a few summers back.  Because Lisa was right, they were never apart.  He laughed inside himself wondering how she did it.  How could she remain a constant fixture at Lisa’s side yet a devoted girlfriend to him?  Brother and sister living in the same house must have helped out.

Yet nobody became jealous of the other or demanded anything of one another.  Except for the time Laura came back for Lisa’s quinceanera and was obviously jealous that everyone else lived their lives harmoniously without her.

“Paco!  Tienes hambre?”

He heard Laura shouting from the kitchen at him.  “No!”  He answered back quickly before she came to find him.  He quickly put the letter in the back pocket of his jeans, knowing it would end up in between the pages of another magazine, hidden somewhere in one of his old drawers.  Maybe one day he’d find the courage to read the rest of it.

By Carolina Rivera–

I like the brick wall my dad built. The other walls are made of corrugated metal, like my friend Cande’s house; although mine is shiny and new, while hers is rusty and decaying with holes.

My little brother yells to Cande from the street, “ your house is a colander,” as she hurls the first stone she finds on her patio that are always filled with dry fallen coffee tree leaves; her house is inside a coffee grove and mine is on the edge of a gully.

I defend Cande and invite her in the afternoon to touch the brick wall, and we play tic-tac-toe on it.

One night Dad tells us he built the brick wall from bricks left over from the last mansion he had finished in the Escalón neighborhood.

People from my neighborhood, my girlfriends, my sisters and brothers are jealous because I love my wall. They tell me that I nurture the wall like I do my baby sister, the bay of the house. I give my baby sister kisses on her little face and comb her fine hair.

Before Christmas arrives, my brothers, sisters and I remove everything from the wall to paint it. My sister and I are the oldest ones, so we give orders to the little ones.

My older brothers don’t want to paint the wall with us because they say it is a game for kids, and not for them. They leave the house wearing their bell pants and long hair that covers their face; the oldest takes his guitar.

When I go out to see where they are going, they have already joined their friends who are parked on one corner of the street.

Nevertheless, today they mixed the whitewash for us before they went to work with Dad.

They mixed the whitewash in a barrel they cut to our size to reach the wall. The oldest, Juan, drew a blue window with clouds that look like a mice and an orange sun on the wall in the outside, and said, “do not even try to paint the wall from the outside.”

On the wall, hangs the most important things of the family. Three days before Christmas, my sister and I took down the gifts we gave to my mother for Mother’s Day: the calendars the lady from the store gave us last Christmas, a poster from El Divino Salvador del Mundo, a fake stone necklace that hangs from an rustic nail and two bough made of soda cork covered with a purple and red terciopelo; mine is a bough of grape, and my sister’s is a strawberry.

When I take them down, I sneeze and  layer of fine dust fades out into the air. My little brother’s gifts are colored pencil drawings inside of a heart-shape construction paper.

My sister is in charge of taking down photographs of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and father when they were in their twenties, and pictures of my older brothers.

In reality, the photos are pencil sketches drawn by my oldest brother’s friend.

One day his friend visited us and mom gave him some colones and seven oxidized photos. In one month, we had them framed in black and white, even better than the original pictures. We hang them on the wall with all the important things that go on the brick wall.

My little brothers’ shower the wall and after they dry it with pieces of clothes, they find themselves in the house.

My brother Antonio is in charge of taking out the nails from the wall. He likes that job because he can use papá’s hammer, as he hangs it on his belt like Dad.

I always invite Cande to help us paint the wall, and if there is some paint left we paint her corrugated metal walls; although last time we painted it, the whitewash didn’t go well because it dissolved into a color like mom’s old photos. Nevertheless, Cande said it doesn’t matter because the Orin yellow color is better than the soot from the oven.

My sister and I bring the barrel filled with whitewash and the brushes of mescal that look like a horses’ tails, and my little brothers are ready to paint. When the barrel comes, my brothers’ surround them and before they immerge the brushes, we interrupt them.

Their happy faces changed into disappointed faces, as they bend their heads down and place the brushes on the floor. After a brief silence, I explained to them that my sister and I will paint the top part.

“Don’t get too close because if whitewash falls on your face, you will be blind. And if it falls on your skin, you will disappear,” I said, as the seven of them moved away.

Clara accommodates them into a vertical line away from the wall where there are only four paintbrushes. I call Antonio and Javier, the two youngest, and I take Antonio and my sister takes Javier.

“Close your eyes, you have to paint with your senses,” I said to Javier.

Javier takes the paint brush and as he lifts it, whitewash falls on his face. We take him down from the chair fast and to the barrel under the mango tree that is full of water from the last storm. We threw two buckets of water on him and he started screaming.

“ I can’t see, I can’t see, the white wash left me blind,” he said, as we laughed. The others moved far away because they were scared and alarmed from Javier’s screams.

We come back to work and Javier falls sleep; my sister put him to bed and covered his eyes with a piece of cloth.

Clara, Antonio and I finished painting the wall, while my siblings help us with pieces of cloth that they manipulated into sponges; like the one Mom used to feed us when we were babies, my siblings fed the wall.

Mom and Dad arrived home and congratulated us for the work on the wall.

I see the wall wide and I imagine it like the sea. In an instant, it transforms itself into a desert with short pathways. The wall is my bed, I dream there. It transforms into a canoe and takes to the other side of the world. I interweave in the wall and now we both are a blanket that covers the roof while my brothers and sisters sleep.

Mom tells us to go sleep and Papá tells us later that he will paint the wall to even out the white color.

The night divides me between the light that reflects from the wall, and the dull light from the corrugated metal walls.  I imagine the wall is a moon from a fantastic purple Christmas, and if I had another paint color, I would paint it the color of a red afternoon; however, we only have whitewash and my dad can’t afford the purple paint. Nevertheless, I have seen my wall painted like a sunset in my dreams.

Late at night when everyone is knocked out, or dizzy, like my dad says, I get up to see the wall. She doesn’t want to go sleep either, so we illuminate into the silence of the night.

I kneel and contemplate her like she is my saint that makes miracles. I like her eyes and I’m the only one that knows where they are, because I invented her eyes; they are black  and almond-shaped, and her May sunflower eyelashes cover me when I hear the dogs barking.

When the paint is dry, I run my fingers on her and carefully take out the mescal hair that stays on when we were painting.

The hair prints look like skinny drunk serpents that don’t know where are they going; the long prints are veins in its white body.

From far away, I observe the wall and I see it is like the sky of a new year. Christmas always finds the brick wall ready to be dressed with a new piece of jewelry for the yew year.

Carolina Rivera is an educator, writer, performer, and filmmaker. She was born in El Salvador, and lives in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.  Rivera completed her undergraduate degree in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing at University of California in Los Angeles.

When I was in fourth grade, I learned in my social studies class that the Spanish founded El Salvador.

Pedro de Alvarado, our teacher said, “was the great conquistador who led the Spanish to civilize the Indians of Cuzcatlán.”

The phrase “the Spanish civilized the Indians” jumps into my memory like a frog into mud and called to mind my youngest brother’s godmother. She was from Spain (and we were very proud of him because he was the only one who had a godmother different from the rest of the us).

My mom calls her “la Españolita, la señorita fina,” because of her fragile complexion.

La Españolita, Mom used to say, “is a good and beautiful person. She has given construction work to your dad.”

My dad used to fix things at her house.

As I walked home from school, I wondered why we did not look like la Españolita with her fine, beautiful, fair skin. I wanted to know whether my grandparents or great-grandparents were from Spain, and whether they spoke like la Españolita.

I arrived home at almost 1:00 p.m.  Mom was standing at the wood-burning stove, feeding pieces of wood into it, causing the pomegranate-colored embers to flame into a hotter fire. As she peeled layers off a small white onion I said, “Good afternoon, Mom.” She turned around, looking like a watermelon on two legs, heavy and tired.

“Good afternoon, daughter, where are your sister and brothers?” She continued cooking.

I had forgotten all about my sister and brothers, but realized they would come soon. I came closer to the stove and pushed the embers with my yellow pencil.

“Stop! You will burn yourself,” my mom warned.

“Mom, where do we come from?” I asked.  “Where did my grandparents and great-grandparents come from?  Why don’t we look like the Españolita?”

“Little girl, where have you come up with all those questions? Here, chop this onion for the rice.” She handed me a small pale onion.

“I don’t want to cook,” I protested.  “I want to know where we come from.”

Mom took the onion and chopped it up, then threw into the pan as the lard melted.

“I am busy right now,” she said.

“The teacher said today that a man named Pedro de Alvarado led the Spaniards to civilize the Indians from Cuzcatlan.” I explained.  “Am I civilized? Are we Indians, Mom?  Why don’t we look like la Españolita?”

“Daughter, I do not have time to answer your questions right now. I have to go to drop off lunch to your dad at work. When I come back this evening, I will tell you a story that your grandma told me about the Indians.”

Evening came, and as she promised, Mom told the story seated by the light of several skinny ten-cent candles melted directly to the surface of the big rectangular red Formica table la Españolita had sold her in several payments. She sipped from her cup of hot chocolate, as she kept eye on my brothers at play on the floor.

“Before the Spanish came, our people spoke only Nahuat,” Mom began.  “The poinsettias in the whole country were white. Indians used to gather and celebrate the birth of new poinsettias.”

“Why are they red now, Mom?”

“The Spaniards killed so many Indians their blood turned the poinsettias red.”

“Why did the Spanish kill the Indians?”

“Not all of them, since you are my little Indian,” Mom explained.  “There are many out there who do not want to be Indians, and neither do they want to be called such.”

As Mom finished the story, she blew out the candles. My brothers and sister were already nesting like kittens in their bed.

The Españolita used to visit us almost every Sunday.  She brought us packages of Diana cookies, blond in color, soft and milky in the middle, layered cookies, nothing special.

I think Mom felt a little pressured to ask her to be my baby brother’s godmother. It is the biggest honor you can give someone, as the godparent becomes your family. Mom had a lot of children to give as a goddaughters or godsons.

One Sunday when the Españolita was coming to visit us, my sister, brothers, and I prepared spears and slingshots, like the Apache Indians we have seen on TV in El Chele William’s, my littler brother’s friend, house as we do not have a TV.

I have also seen pictures of Indians in my older brothers’ history books. We even plucked several feathers from the hens to put them on our heads, like the picture in the book. We painted our faces with soot from the ashes under the comal on the stove.

When la Españolita arrived at the door, we surrounded her, chanting songs like the Apache Indians and brandishing our weapons. My brother shot her and got her on her delicately long giraffe neck with his slingshot. She screamed for help.

“Girls, boys, stop!” shouted la Españolita.  “What is wrong with all of you?”

Mom came running out of the kitchen with a stick in her hand. “Sorry comadre, ah, these children are playing at being Indians today.”

The godmother sat down on the first chair she saw, rubbing her neck with her right hand. Mom took me by the hand and swatted me with the stick on my legs.

“You are the inventor of this problem. Your brothers and sister could have killed her with those slingshots.”  She whacked me one more time on my legs; it stung like habanero chiles in the mouth.

I pursed my lips and, pulled out the hen’s feather from my hair, and softly told Mom, “But she and her people killed the Indians from Cuzcatlán, from here, Mom.”

“Daughter, that happened more than 500 years ago, and she was not that one who killed them.”

I felt like our dog Sultan, hiding his tail, and bending his head low when he is caught eating food that does not belong to him. I stayed in my bed all day wondering whether the Españolita would ever bring us Diana cookies again.

Light bounces from building to doorway to woman, changing each from brown to gold and back to brown as evening prepares to settle in.

Juliette-balconied buildings, some with shuttered windows to close out the heat, snuggle closely to its neighbor, allowing only a sliver of gold to stain the façade that before the Revolution, shone brilliantly as white, or pink, or blue or green. Now the peeling paint mingles with crumbling chunks of plaster and tropical air, make it hard to determine whether gray is the recent color or part of the past.

Smells of fried plantain, car exhaust, gutter waste, and an occasional whiff of jasmine waft across your nostrils with each exhale of your breath, although the thick humidity makes it incredibly hard to breathe as the day struggles to end, and the heat refuses to let go.

Heat muffles sound and grounds even the flies that are too hot to buzz and annoy the inhabitants.

She stands there. Alone. In front of the ornately carved ten foot oak doors, much like sentinels on guard, who keep the outsiders out and shield and protect those who hunker down inside.

The angle of the light shadows her face, yet bounces off her red twirly mini-skirt and the turquoise off-the-shoulder spandex top, faded from one too many washings, the straps resting in the space between her shoulders and her elbows. She wears flip-flops several sizes too big, yet showcase her immaculate feet.

Her eyes and nose hide in the shadow of the setting sun, but her lips, round and full and just a taint pouty, are painted a muted red. A tumbled mass of thick, wavy, black hair appears to be an aura of sorts surrounding her small face. Perhaps she’s an angel or at least a tropical goddess.

Hope is all there is on this decaying island.

And Dreams.

As the light shifts in its final decline, the young woman provocatively sucks on an orange Popsicle as she gazes down the brick paved street at the German, or Canadian or European men who are willing to pay to spend time with a chocolate dream.

“Ay, mucho calor,” she whispers to herself as she takes a delicate white, lace, embroidered handkerchief from her tiny bosom and daps at the rivulets of sweat meandering down her face. On the inhale, you can smell gardenia.

There is no breeze, only heat and humidity. There is no relief in sight.

And no money either.

An old woman carefully picks her way down the same street, making sure not to step on the cracks between the bricks that cover the narrow street. She fingers a rosary surely whispering a prayer as she daintily makes her way on the uneven bricks. She’s dressed in all black, tightly buttoned from the top of her neck to the bottom of the long full skirt that brushes the tops of her black shoes, making a swishing sound with every step.

Swish, swish, swish.

She looks up when the aroma of jasmine tickles her nose as she passes the young woman standing in the doorway. She whispers ‘puta’ to no one in particular as if that word is part of her prayer.

But the woman standing in the doorway is not a woman, but a girl of twelve maybe fourteen. Times are hard and this is the only way she has to help feed her younger sibling, courtesy of The Revolution.

She ignores the insult and disapproving look from the old woman but quickly jerks her head to the right when she hears ‘Anjelicka’. She knows the voice. She and her younger brother walk this way home from school everyday.

With the back of her hand, she quickly wipes off the lipstick, pulls the straps of her turquoise top up onto her shoulders, gathers her thick mane of black hair and deftly makes one long braid, wiggles her skirt lower and turns towards the voice looking very much like the ‘tween’ she is. She smiles and almost skips a bit as her baby brother gets closer.

She adores her younger brother. He feels the same about her. The two of them were left in the care of their grandmother when their mother left in search of their father.

She doesn’t remember much about her father. Only his smile and how he tossed her into the air whenever he saw her and how she tucked her head into the curve of his neck because she felt safe when he was around. He wasn’t around much because he was American, a revolutionary who had hijacked a plane from the United States in search of Nirvana.

Her grandparents didn’t see him that way. They didn’t want trouble from the Neighborhood Watch Group so they discouraged her mother from contact with him.

“Revolutionary,” her grandfather used to sputter loud enough for the neighbors to hear, “Che, Fidel, now they were revolutionaries. You stay away from that prieto,” her grandfather warned. Her grandmother recognized the look in her daughter’s eyes and knew the warning fell upon deaf ears.

And not long after, Anjelicka was born, her brother quickly followed.

And her father, she never saw him again. He was missing and her mother left to find him. And now she too is missing.

All her mother left Anjelicka are letters; letters written by her father to his sister in the U.S. and her letters to him. His sister, her father always said, that she looked just like. The sister whose name he sometimes whispered in her ear and quickly turned his head to wipe away a tear. The sister, who never judged him, only loved him for who he was.

Letters neatly tied with a faded ribbon inside a beautifully carved wooden oak box that hasn’t been opened in years.

Anjelicka thinks perhaps now with her parents missing and her grandfather dead, is time to remove the shroud regarding her father’s life. Perhaps she’ll even discover who she is. She smiles at this thought and walks to pick up the box.

She gingerly opens the dusty wooden container. She carefully fingers the envelope on the top. It was addressed to her father with a return address in Chicago. What a different time it must have been to communicate directly with the United States she muses.  Stacks of letters bound by faded ribbons are arranged according to dates with the earliest on top.

Anjelicka’s abuela shuffles into the room. She is now very old and very sick. She walks to one of the two chairs placed in front of the window and slowly eases herself down. She smiles at her granddaughter while her eyes lower to the box in Angelicka’s hand.

She nods her head in approval, and pats the chair directly across from her,

“Estás bien mi amor, it’s okay my love, it is time,” the old woman whispers to the young girl. “Pero empieza, but start at the beginning.”

This is an excerpt from a novel in progress, “Jesus Wept,” by Jan Peña-Davis, a teacher and writer in Chicago.

A tall man in a sophisticated suit probably custom made to fit his great body, had walked in and stood just inside the entrance.  He scanned the room as if he were looking for someone.  Then Nelly Apolonia  ran out of the large hall and to the kitchen and came back out with Mrs. Ortelli who called out in high-pitched shock,  “Eric!”

Eric?  Ortelli?  Victoria stood by the coffee pots staring like everyone else at the guy who had inspired so much gossip through the years.  There had been stories that he’d had a big fight with his parents, or that he’d gotten a girl pregnant in another state over spring break or even that he’d killed someone and was hiding out.  Speculation ran the gambit from wild to ridiculous.  Then eventually all gossip died down until out respect for Lucia Ortelli, no one mentioned Eric at all.  So much time had passed since Eric had left home that Victoria had started to wonder if maybe he’d been a figment of their collective imagination, and he’d never existed at all.  A sort of tall tale that had taken a legendary quality over the years.  Yet here he was looking very real, and very handsome, and like he’d done extremely well for himself.

Mrs. Ortelli ran to her son and pulled this broad shouldered man into an embrace.  Eric closed his eyes and held his mother close.  He kissed the top of her head as she pulled back to look at him.  Taking in the same image as the rest of the club  – an amazingly put together guy with dark, angular features and black, wavy hair that if left longer would probably have curls.  Different from the skinny, dimpled boy who left home.
After a brief private moment in a sea of observers where mother and son shared who knows what with their gazes, Mrs. Ortelli turned around with a huge smile and said, “Surprise.  He made it home tonight after all.”

Was she going to try to pull off the lie that she expected him to show up?  She’d been just as surprised as everyone else.  But like her mother always said, Lucia should have been an actress, because she lived her life pretending.  Pretending her life was perfect.

She pulled Eric into the crowd, talking to everyone around her, calling for someone to bring him a plate of food.  He offered a gorgeous smile as he shook hands and accepted hugs or kisses.  Lucia led him to their family table and Mr. Ortelli who had been fetched from the patio, joined them.  As if Eric were a celebrity or a war veteran come home, people passed by their table to welcome him – though Victoria knew it was more out of curiosity and nosiness than anything else.

“Can you believe this?” Jaqueline whispered, having come to stand beside her. “What’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know, but to show up, just like that, without warning, to such a public place.  He has no shame,” Jaqueline said.

“Mrs. Ortelli said she knew.”  Victoria offered.  Often the target of club criticism herself, she felt a small need to defend Eric.
“Well what else is she going to say?  Pobre Lucia.”

Saving face.  Such an Argentine trait.  Too proud to say ‘my son’s a jerk’ All around them people were doing the same kind of whispering as Victoria and Jaqueline.

“Let’s go say hello and welcome him home,” her mother continued, grabbing Victoria by the elbow.

Victoria frowned.  “No, give them some privacy.”

“It would be rude not to say something.  Vamos.”

Jaqueline pulled Victoria’s arm and led her to the Ortelli table.  “Eric, querido, what an amazing surprise,” Jaqueline said, and hugged him.

Eric stood for the hundredth time and opened his arms to Jaqueline, dropping a kiss on her cheek.  Then without pausing he said hi and kissed Victoria.  Then he took his seat again.

Victoria checked him out.  He’d grown thicker, more muscular, more solid.  Still just as handsome as he’d been in high school.  He sipped his wine with a relaxed arrogance that didn’t seem quite proper considering the commotion he’d caused.

“How have you been Victoria?”

Again, the question was one that would make sense if he’d been way a few months, maybe a year.  But for someone who’d disappeared seven years ago, his attitude seemed too casual.  “Where should I start?”

He chuckled.  “Wherever you’d like.  Have a seat.  Do you mind Mami?”

Now he was asking if his mother minded what he did?

“No, but you eat.  Your food is getting cold.”

“I’m not hungry.”  He eased the plate away.  “I didn’t come to eat anyway.  I actually went home and when no one was there I remembered it was Sunday and figured you’d be here.”

“It’s not only Sunday,” Victoria said.  “It’s Independence Day.”

He frowned.  “Oh, in Argentina.  That’s right.”  He glanced around.  “No wonder all this.”

No one said anything in response.  To forget July 9th was too big of an insult to comment on.

“I was actually just leaving,” Victoria said.  “So enjoy your dinner.”

Jaqueline gave her a scowl.  “You can stay a little longer. Talk to Eric for a while.”

“We shouldn’t intrude,” Victoria said.

Antonio Ortelli, who had walked in from the grills with a surprised look on his face, had hugged his son then sat to let his wife handle all the questions.  Now he stood.  “We have time to catch up when we get home.”  He patted Eric on the shoulder.  “Let’s continue to enjoy the celebration.”

“Of course,” Lucia said, and though she didn’t appear to want to let Eric out of her sight for a second, she also stood.  “I’m going to go finish up in the kitchen and let you get reacquainted with your friends.  Your father’s right, we’ll have you all to ourselves later.  There’s plenty of time.”

Eric squeezed her fingers with his large, dark hands.  The guy had a spectacular tan, the color of dark, golden honey.

“All the time in the world,” he said, before his mother and Jaqueline returned to the kitchen.  Lucia looked back at him twice as if afraid he’d disappear.

Faced with making casual conversation with a man she didn’t know anymore, she took a seat across from him and tried to remember who he had been when they’d last spoken.  Fun came to mind.  Mama’s boy.  Cheerful.  He didn’t look like any of those things anymore.  He looked harder.

He sipped from his glass of wine with lips that could possibly also be hard, but right now they looked shiny and sexy surrounded by the five o’clock shadow on his face.  “This place never changes.”

“Some things never do.”  Nor do some people.  Namely, her.  He, on the other hand, was almost unrecognizable.

His light brown eyes rested on her, after doing a very quick, barely noticeable scan of her body.  “Remember when we used to sneak up to the offices on the second floor and pretended to look for clues that this was a secret organization involved in some kind of plot to take over the world?”

She wanted to smile at the memories of their childhood games.  They’d had so much fun.  She and Eric and Susana and a handful of other kids who were now all grown and married.  Except for her.  And maybe Eric.  After high school they’d all stopped being friends.  And he’d disappeared.  Maybe that was why she wouldn’t allow herself to enjoy reminiscing with him.

“I don’t think we knew what we were looking for,” he continued.  “Or even why our parents would want to take over the world.”

“Maybe we just wanted to have fun.”

“Yeah, or maybe we wanted to believe they were more than just lonely immigrants longing for a piece of their homeland.”

The way he said that, with such derision, irritated her.  But a part of Victoria wondered if that was true.  Kids always thought their parents were all powerful and important.  But had she ever wished they were more than what they were?  No.  “Is that why you finally came home?  Longing for everything you walked away from?”

He took another sip of wine, but kept his gaze on her, probably wondering how she’d had the nerve to ask him directly what everyone was wondering.  “Maybe.”

From the book “Evenings at the Argentine Club” by Julia Amante.  Copyright (c) 2009 by Liliana Monteil Doucette. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.”

Women’s fiction author, Julia Amante who also writes as Lara Rios, has been writing and publishing Latino fiction for over ten years.  Her passion in seeing works by Latinos in bookstores comes from her frustration
over the lack of Latino-themed books that were available to her growing up. With her books she hopes to bring readers a taste of Latino culture tied to emotionally rich stories. Read more about her work at her Web site.

The bicycle he had in Tijuana caught fire each time he rode down a steep hill. Ramiro had Frankensteined a bike out of discarded car bumpers, abandoned wheels and stiff plastic tubing. No metal bolts found dumpster diving through America’s waste, but he did find hundreds of discarded wooden chips throughout his neighborhood. He used those to rivet the bike together each time the downhill speed turned the wood into ash.

In Guadalajara, away from the overflowing luxury junkyard of the U.S. border, Ramiro bought a bike for 12 sterling pesos. A real metal melded bike. He pumped the petals to apprentice for his uncle’s construction company, molding blocks of clay and concrete to build houses. “Maestro” he called his uncle according to custom. The official title exempted Maestro from adhering to regulated work hours or child labor laws. Those laws only protected 9 year olds in El Norte.

Ramiro Rubio’s bike took him to the houses he was building and its handlebars carried his older sister Teresa to the houses she cleaned. Riding home on the dirt streets that burned orange at sunset they saw a man’s silhouette and heard it cough. The sticky sound of emphysema that tars the roof of smokers’ lungs was familiar.  “I think that’s our dad,” Tere said.

Ramiro permanently released the plastic coated handlebars to help his Tijuana transplant dad find a job; he would stay longer if he had work. Ramiro’s dad complained about the lack of opportunity. His son would walk the final step of a three-mile journey home from work through the slanted wooden doorway.

“No hay nada,” his father would say and the little boy would kick away a copper cockroach and crawl onto his flat linty mattress.

Ramiro’s bike stopped carrying the Rubios to work. It was now parked outside the bar. Outside the drunken uncles shack. Outside el otro bar. Perpetually outside of the yard where Ramiro once carefully tied it with rope to a tree to protect it.

For light, Ramiro and his gang of dirt stained friends lit tires on fire and played soccer with aluminum cans. The wet season would turn his ashy discolorations into mud streaks across his already dark skin. Ramiro avoided drinking the local water as it hosted bacteria large enough to be kept as pets. He hated bathing in it even more, a trait he carried into adulthood, and showered only when the weather permitted. When it rained, they all smelled like earth.

Ramiro and his organic scented friends would use their burning tire lit evenings discovering ways to continually amuse and cripple each other. When the soccer got boring or someone sliced their fingers blocking a goal, an avocado pit was then turned into a missile, pebbles into ammo, pen tubes into pistols.

After enough blood and limbs were shed playing soldier, the unintentional engineers stomped on the aluminum beer cans to make tap shoes. They were crumpled up scraps of metal. Shiny and malleable. Twisted and deformed. If the second-hand shoes they wore were a size too big, they went barefoot. They stomped on the can to mold it to their arches, unaware they were a misstep away from slicing off their big toe.

In Vietnam, Ramiro and his new organic smelling friends dreaded stepping in aluminum cans. They all feared the same deformities and loss of blood Ramiro and his old gang had laughed at as chiquillos. They wore the same clothes Ramiro did; the jungleflage looked different on his skinny frame. They talked different than Ramiro did saying “y’all” and “shrapnel” instead of “jou” and “eskrapnel,” which led to the unanimous decision that the wetback with the gooky accent could never be the radioman.

They all feared stepping on the metal can claw filled with feces and the rains and oil and death. Not intended to kill, but to destroy.  It would dig its metallic talons into an unsuspecting leg, cutting through the unifying fabric fatigues and into the calf of the soldier who didn’t know better and tried to pull out.

The dangers of Ramiro’s tap shoes were always well known and easy to kick off. Continually cutting their calloused feet made his and his gangs’ 9-year-old soles as hard as those of men. The familiar clinkity clinks of a Broadway show landed as heavy thuds on the Mexican dirt floor that burned orange at sunset.

Ramiro’s bike turned into a tin tap shoe when his dad DUI’ed it on the side of a neighbors house. The bike would’ve survived if it weren’t for the old mans rage that was unleashed through the scraped skin. He threw the little bike against the wall, grabbed it by the plastic handlebars and rammed it a few more times against the stucco perpetrator to silence it from sneering at his manhood.

The crashed bicycle became a rusted sculpture on the side of the cantina – the first of the Rubio outsider art pieces. Ramiro said goodbye to the backyard cemetery of projects his father started, goodbye to the empty glass bottles that finished the job. Said goodbye to the secrets of aluminum cans in the rain. He finally said goodbye to his dad as he lay in a soft cotton bed with plastic tubes running up his genius nose around his ears and through his stomach. Emphysema had finished building its house in that Rubio body.

The small stack of “Return to Sender” letters on the dining room table indicates all Ramiro’s dirt covered friends have rebuilt their houses or themselves somewhere far and unreachable. They stare out uniformly from the silver frame; the four White guys the Black man and the gooky looking wetback that posted his name and address on Internet ‘Nam Vet forums, pecking at  the keyboard with one finger, double checking the screen for accuracy.

“Ramiro Rubio – 101st Airborne 67-68. Santa Ana, Calif.”

He hopes they have computers in their unlisted homes. He hopes they remember his name.

Marytza Rubio is a 2008 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow based in Santa Ana, Calif.