Epigraphist
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
T
his is where the bus hit. And this, this is Paula, my older sister. And this is Bogotá in the summer. As if there were summers in the equator and not just one uninterrupted season of rain and sun and rain again, mashed into a single blur of continuous days that crash one into the other leaving parts and marks and scrapes in one another’s backs and faces. Blurred and bright and bruised. And this is the license plate number imbedded like braille on my sister’s hip. This is Paula, after the bus hit, in a neck brace on the couch when I come home from school one day. And that’s me laughing, because she looks a bit like a flipped over armadillo, in a neck brace on the couch, and when I chuckle she chuckles too. So I think it harmless and keep on laughing. But that’s Paula, earlier that day, flat on her back in the middle of an intersection. Breathless and cold while a driver considers the human dent she may have left on his front fender. So that’s me, later. Beside her on the couch, not quite laughing anymore. Looking at bruises and scrapes and partial license plate indentations on muscle and skin. And me, again, listening to explanations of intersections and bus drivers circumventing unconscious bodies. Screeches and thuds and metal and meat. This is the moment when bus meets sister and sister flies and driver drives. That’s me, staring at the yellow-purple etching of a fresh bruise that slowly appears like a 3-D painting you have to stare at cross-eyed for hours to finally see. Me, wanting to run my finger on the swollen grooves of what could be a “5” or an “S,” trying to think in concrete numbers, like the ones I see pressed into her hip. How far did we run that time when she sprinted mad and angry and barefoot through a rain-wet street in Bogotá, and I trailed after thinking I could 22 Cabeza-Vanegas
