Writing – Francesca Varese

after “If They Should Come For Us” by Fatimah Asghar

these are my people & I find them across

borders where sun rays stream upon our bronzed faces

eyes the color of earth and hips wide as the seas

my people my people mi gente mi gente

my grandmother’s hand reaches to touch my forehead

crevices cut through her palms she traces a cross on my figure

heaving her arms up and down with a holiness

only she can wield Amen Amen

mi gente mi gente

Digame, she says, are they feeding you enough up there?

my land lies below the winding river where

mami held me over her head wading through

her skirt stained cerulean by the tide forever rising

my people, will I ever reach you?

I claim you as my people but do you claim me as yours?

I speak your language in fractures

words lose their meaning as they scramble out

my throat

Am I yours when I do not live in your land?

when it exists only on holidays or when I’m

fast asleep

Am I one of you when I leave your land by plane?

skirt unscathed all the way “home”

I only pray on Christmas or when somebody has died

mi gente am I yours? I

am caught in a rift

body stretched across the wall that divides us and

our family and

our people

Mi gente?

You drove with both the windows down. Recklessly thrashing your father’s blue Volvo around the curves of Mulholland drive. He didn’t know you had taken it out; I wasn’t sure he knew you had gone out at all. The road ahead of us was blurry, indistinct. Was it the tears pooling in my eyes from the force of the air or had your dad forgotten to take the car to the wash once again? Your permit didn’t allow you to drive anyone, let alone drive past the eleventh hour of the night. And I wasn’t allowed to be in a car with a boy at all, let alone on a Saturday night when my parents thought I was at the Homecoming game, let alone with an older boy I had barely ever met before. You had one hand on the steering wheel when there should have been two, the other lay gently on my hand. I sat beside you, unsure of whether you noticed my gaze creeping towards you, hoping the tires screeched loud enough to muffle the thundering of my heart.

The first day of Sophomore year was the first time I remembered you. I had always thought your face held the echoes of a boy I used to know. I had actually known you for years before. You were the pudgy little boy with braces chaining back your smile. You didn’t remember me either; I had undergone my fair share of change. I wonder when I stopped drinking my drinks with a straw? When I stopped squeezing honey into my tea?

“I’ll take you to a spot I know”, you told me as you got in the car, nearly tripping over your long, lanky legs you hadn’t quite grown into yet. We didn’t talk on the way there; maybe that’s why you turned the music up so loud. I tried to tell myself the songs you played were meant for me, that they weren’t just a playlist you shuffled whenever you took a girl for a spin.

“Where are we going?”, I said. “You’ll see,” you began, then you added, “The LA river”.

The LA river doesn’t run; it could barely be called a stream. It is nothing but an empty vessel of concrete, the sides caked with mud, holding the echoes of what may have been.

I put perfume on that morning; I started putting on perfume every morning in hopes you would notice it. Before we left school, I asked you to wait outside the bathroom as I quickly brushed my hair and reapplied perfume on my wrists, my collar bone, and my neck. When we arrived at your “spot,” you leaned in, and I thought you were going to kiss me, but instead, you placed your head next to my neck and took a deep inhale.

As the door of the car lay open and cold air streamed in, I sat there frozen in place, as if you had forbidden a single one of my muscles to move. All I could do, all I could say, was emit a breathy cry. My words, concealed by a cloud of vapor as I looked at you and said, “Will I see you again?”

Water doesn’t flow within the walls of the LA river. People drive past it, averting their gaze, hoping not to be met with the sorry sight of it. The LA river could never be considered a river, for it is barely a stream. I had always thought you and I would go somewhere, that you and I were truly something.

Last night, I dreamt of him, the boy who drove with the windows down, and when I awoke, the first thing I did was try to fall asleep again. I failed, of course, so I stayed in this state of half-way consciousness as I tried to revisit that land of ours I barely got to explore. 9,10 hours, it’s never enough time. If only who he is in my dreams could exist when I awoke. For him, I’d sleep forever.

The woman I once loved most was not my mother. I called her my nana, though she had no relation to me at all. Her skin resembled the warm soil of her country, her long silver hair like a platted shooting star. In my parent’s absence throughout my upbringing, Vidalia cared for me.

Once, or twice a week, Vidalia would make tortillas in our little kitchen. She stacked crinkling white bags of maseca on our kitchen counter, making the room opaque with the particles that strayed. She filled the home with the hearty aroma of raw masa and fresh tortillas, the smells which wafted through my neighborhood inviting whomever wished for a taste. She filled the house with music. The gentle crackling of our stove, the little claps of patting out the dough, my little laughs as I followed along with her, the instruments in her symphony. Crevices cut through Vidalia’s hand, permanently branding her with years of hard work. As she flattened the little spheres of masa, these lines and scars imprinted on the tortilla as if it too had been through her life before she swiftly smoothed them with water. She placed each of her palms above my own, moving my little hands. To Vidalia, learning to make tortillas was as important as learning to read was to me, a skill, she never had a fortune of acquiring herself. She taught me to make tortillas like her mother taught her, her mother who was taught by her own mother who had been taught by her own mother.

I became one of Vidalia’s bloodline as I adorned my tortilla with frijoles and queso fresco she had made long before I woke up. My mother would scorn as she saw me eat our creations, telling us how she’d never think of ingesting something so fattening. I used to never pay a mind to her as I gobbled fresh tortilla upon fresh tortilla.

“Cuéntame una historia de cuando eras chiquita”, Tell me a story of when you were little. I used to always ask her. Now, I recognize the face she would make as one of pain. Before, I simply waited for the tale to begin. Vidalia would always tell me stories of herself and her siblings in Guatemala, all the places the twelve of them explored, all the trouble they got into. She never told me about how she submerged her entire body in the Rio Grande, despite never having swam before, hiding from the border patrol. How she felt like she was drowning as her comrades around her were shot or captured. She never told me how her son got shot by gangs in Guatemala, how guilty she felt about having left him alone for all those years. She told me stories while she cooked, she sang, she prayed, but her pain was never one I truly got to share.

When he was a little boy, his father told him to shoot a small gray hare that had come across their path. It appeared amongst a field of emerald ferns, illuminated by sunlight as if it were a spirit or an angel. For just one, or two, fleeting seconds, the creature gazed at the boy, piercing him with its eyes of deep amber. His father shoved the shotgun towards him “Shoot it”, but the boy felt his arms harden to stone. His father’s rugged breaths of anticipation could hardly be heard over the thundering of his heart. “Shoot it!”, his father repeated again. The little boy fumbled with the gun as he tried to mimic what he had seen his father do many times before. His world condensed to only what could be seen through the small hole of the shotgun. His small finger trembled as he held it on the trigger. “Shoot that little b****”, his father shouted, and the little boy did. As the gentle creature returned to the soil, sinking into a pool of its own blood, the boy could hear nothing except the haunting murmurs of the wind rustling against the trees. His father’s applause never reached him, his praise on how he had finally become a man, his toughness, his courage. The little boy could only think about the hares’ eyes, how they held the same color as his own. He knew this was a moment he would look back upon, and never forget. The moment he had taken a life just as his own, the moment he had become a man. And when he couldn’t stare at the sight any longer, he thought of those who would pass by the trail and see the Earth stained crimson.