FICTION
Pet’s Condensed Milk by Magda Montiel Davis
H
er eyes were aflame and that’s what struck me when she opened the front door of our brand new home. Our brand new home in Havana, in the brand new neighborhood of Nuevo Vedado, somewhere between its hilly slopes and the riverbed of el Rio Almedares. Somewhere between middle and upper-middle class. I was six, maybe seven. She stood in anesthetized stillness, save for clipped bursts of breath that lifted the clavicle of her chest. The woman had just climbed three flights of stairs to get to our home, its entrance an accordion of concrete steps with decorative patterns of seashells. It was a mezzanine of sorts, these steps; a prelude. They led to stairs that looked as if they were suspended in air, just one concrete beam down the middle supporting the entire structure. In her arms, the woman held a baby, its cheeks cherry red; sunburned. She held it at her hip, not at her chest. She held it as if the weight of the child would have her drop it montanamouthful.com
any minute. Now she moved. She shifted her weight slightly, tightened one arm around the child, swung out the other and in silence, opened a pink-white palm to me. I called out over my shoulder, my eyes not leaving the woman’s face. “¡Mami!” Clickettyclack my mother’s stilettos on the mirrory terrazzo floor. Mami stopped when she saw it was just the beggar woman. “Just a minute,” her voice large from the other end of the living room. A look of hope lifted the woman’s face, a face of ashen brown grimed with streaks of dirt. Years later, I would see the picture of a copperfaced woman on the cover of National Geographic with the same burning eyes and that’s what I would remember, the beggar woman standing silent before me on our front porch. The woman moved the baby to the other hip. It was then that I saw the body, arms like sticks, stomach the roundness, the size of its head. And not a baby, not a baby at all. Not a Montana Mouthful | 5