Short Fiction
Her mother had kept four-leaf clovers and birds’ feathers in jars of colored glass she stored in the west-facing kitchen window so they caught the last rays of sun each day. She claimed that the rose garden she planted had been the key to holding her family together. When Isabela became pregnant—she was twenty-two years old, unmarried, her boyfriend a nineteen-year-old pot dealer—her mother told her that she was on her own. She taught Isabela to rely on no one but herself. Isabela believed that if one had problems and wanted to fix them, then the world provided earthly, and Heavenly, remedies. You only needed to believe, her mother always said. When her daughter was born, Isabela named her Cecilia, after her grandmother. “It’s just,” Maria said now, stopped, then continued. “My kids drive me crazy, and Jorge does little to help. He’s tired after work, and after a beer or two, forget it. And this other man, he’s young, has no children, and he likes me. I’ve fantasized about him.” “You want to run away from your problems,” Isabela said. “Maybe you should attack them at the root.” Isabela paused for effect. Maria’s eyes widened. She held shop in the tiny red house where she and Cecilia had once lived, before Isabela’s parents’ death. There she read palms and Tarot cards, provided remedies for ailments, relied on a short string of return clients, and occasionally did more than break even at month’s end. The shop sat, coincidentally, on the corner of Merritt and Palm Streets in Castroville, next to The Patio Drive-in, a hamburger restaurant where gangbangers—including Anita, Isabela’s cousin—hung out in the cabs of their white Impalas and candyapple-green Cadillacs and drank bagged bottles of beer. Isabela had painted her roadside hand-shaped sign bright red. Currently, to Isabela’s dismay, one of the election signs had been posted in the soil next to her bright red palm: neon yellow and announcing one Kenneth Ellsworth, who was running for Monterey County Sheriff. The gaudy signs had been placed all over town and this particular one distracted potential customers. Fortunately she served regulars, like Maria Ramos. Isabela had furnished the rooms in the tiny house according to function. The living room became a reception area and a small shop. Here she kept a couch, where waiting clients could sit, and a desk with a locking drawer to hold money. She stocked the shelf-lined walls with crystals strung on yarn, books on astrology, astrological calendars, and herbal remedies. She gave Atticus Review│Get Lit: Round 1
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