Reg a

24 Short Story

Icouldn’t know then that tamales are bitter work, often stolen after the three-day labor for cheek kisses. But I think I was nine when I first sunk my feet into the sun-bleached edge of my birth city. My great-aunt tía Reglita stood by the picnic tables a quarter mile from my cousin and my great-uncle Gerardo and me, and she watched. Tío waded into the dim golden waters with us in the afternoon, and never invited her in. But I was nine. I didn’t ask.

*** My cousin and I held our breaths in my grandparents’ community pool. Tía stood on the concrete shallow end, where I could see her anxiety in crossed arms and carded fingers through silver-tinged frizzing hair in the summer swelter. I was ten, and I asked why she would suffer it. “Sí, me baño, pero aquí no.” I laughed because I didn’t understand. Not the words, but the meaning behind her almost-smile. I bathe, she’d said, but not here I don’t.

*** Six years ago I sat across from my cousin at a rehearsal dinner. Large platters of milanesa and palomilla and chicharrones, the staples in white rice and black beans, many forms of plantains and garlic-buttered steaming breads for all three tables of our party except for him.

“I’ve been taking the train to school,” he said, and dipped his McDonald’s chicken nugget in some sauce. I knew better, but I asked, “Don’t you have a car?”

His excuse was half the danger of highways, half the glance he made toward his grandmother, my tía, who was driving conversation down the line with the people we’ve always known. But my cousin, he’d always had three homes: the one he visited, the one he returned to with his mom and step-father, and the one he continued to be fostered in with collectibles from childhood. *** My cousin inherited it, her fear. She wore it from the moment she set her path as a newlywed fourteen-year-old from the birthplace of herself and of the guayaba. She boarded a rickety vessel which trudged the noventa millas— all ninety miles through nature’s weapons, the opportunists; the near-blind leviathans which often scored perimeters for them in the deep Atlantic, or trailed behind for the Guard’s bycatch. And afterwards, my family alone became hers. Miami may have indoctrinated it but the guayaba which makes your guava is still a foreign fruit, at times too sweet for its history. And Reglita, she is my tía, who makes tamales on Christmas Eve.

I am not allowed outside when it rains. The house, cavernous and breathy, is a baritone labyrinth. A table, a chair, my shoe against the baseboard, my hand on the wall The darkness muffles the sound of the pit pith plink like Morse code on the pavement It beckons but I must never answer, in frustration it roars behind closed doors, slashing at blacked out windows. The air is gray, not with dust—the absence of color. Nighttime lurks in the corners, in faraway places I cannot touch. My palm to the glass, I see the emerald rain. A quick slip, a gap between the pane and the rain is blue. Ice on my fingertips, electric sliver, then steady gold. This is what a rainbow feels like. Poetry 25