“As man can be in but one place, at once, he cannot have the advantage of multiplied residence. He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade. He who goes voluntarily to America, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe.”
– Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny

“I am fed up with this bloody sunshine!” my mother shouted as I rolled over and pulled a blanket over my head. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the reflection of her slender arm in my vanity mirror, her long fingers stretching to reach an orange that dangled an inch beyond her grasp. This was how she began each day now: standing on the second-to-the-top step of Dad’s wooden stepladder, shouting at the citrus trees while she plucked fruit from their thorny black branches.

From the first week we moved from North Carolina to Burbank, Mom insisted on squeezing a glass of fresh orange juice for Dad every morning. He’d grown up in a world of cold. Icy Massachusetts winters followed by the seeping damp of London and the sharp frigidity of New York City. Mom hoped that a glass of sunshine to start each day would warm him up from the inside out. Dad preferred a pot of black coffee and a Salem menthol.

The unrelenting sun beating down through a perpetually cloudless sky was beginning to drive Mom as barmy as the damp had driven Dad. How could people be expected to live without weather?
Dad never listened when Mom ranted, so lately she’d taken to screaming at the trees. She’d read somewhere that plants grew better if you talked to them. On really bad days she’d go outside and choke the lemon tree, which was just about her size. More of a lemon bush, really. “Time to get up!” she shouted, banging on my window, the pockets of her floral apron full of fruit. I gave up, threw the quilt off the bed, and dragged myself into the kitchen for breakfast.

Mom squeezed the oranges by hand while Dad ate his fried eggs and bacon and read the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Watergate investigators were closing in on President Nixon. The same headline every morning. My brother Dave sprawled over two wrought-iron chairs, his tall tan body barely covered by a towel. Mom sat down to her breakfast of hot tea and dry Melba toast. I poured myself a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

“I’m off to the market,” Mom said. “Who’d like to come along?” she asked, looking at Dave.

“We need butter,” Dad said. “You can have the car. I have a lecture to prepare.” Dad taught bacteriology at UCLA. In the summer he had one graduate seminar a week, a schedule that left him plenty of time for his own research, and to putter in the vegetable garden he’d started out back.

“I’ll go,” I said. There were some things I wanted to pick up anyway.

I belted myself into the front seat of our green Ambassador station wagon, and my mother slowly drove the five blocks to Von’s, which was practically empty when we got there. Most people did their shopping later in the day, when the overactive air conditioning was a relief rather than an irritant. It was 94 degrees outside, but I wished I’d brought a sweater. Mom hummed along to the instrumental version of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head that tinkled cheerily in the background, and tossed cans of Campbell’s soup into the seat section of the cart. The supermarket was bright and sterile as a dentist’s office, and now it had a soundtrack to match.

We rolled through the meat section, where Mom argued merrily with the butcher about the price of lamb; past the dairy section where we bought eggs, butter and plain yoghurt; then on to the Health, Beauty and Feminine Needs aisle. Mom sang Do You Know the Way to San Jose? under her breath and compared prices on various size bottles of Pearl Drops tooth-whitening gel, while I surreptitiously added a sky blue ten-pack of Tampax Juniors to the cart. If Mom didn’t see them before the cashier did, she wouldn’t make me put them back – she hated for anyone to think she couldn’t afford to buy something. I almost got away with it, until she jerked the cart backwards to check the sale price on Pond’s cold cream, causing the shiny package of blood-red lamb to slide down to the bottom of the cart, exposing the box for everyone to see.

“How did this get here?” Mom asked, holding the slim package with an outstretched arm, keeping it as far away as possible from her own body.

“I put that there,” I replied, in my most nonchalant tone. “My period is due, and I want to be able to go swimming.” My new friend Julie had invited me to a pool party on Saturday. The first invitation I’d received since we’d moved here three months before. “Well, you’ll not be using these,” Mom decreed. “These are meant for mature women. No unmarried daughter of mine will be using tampons.” She could barely bring herself to say the word.

“But that’s not true anymore,” I said. “A doctor developed these ones! You can use them from the start of your very first period! They have a flushable plastic applicator!”

Mom stared as if I were shouting obscenities in church. “And how would you know a thing like that?” she asked, her eyes narrow and cold.

“I read it. In an ad. In McCall’s.”

“In my McCall’s?”

“It was on the coffee table,” I answered. Thinking this was not the time to reveal that I also read the Playboys and Penthouses that my dad hid under the cushions of the living room couch.

“We’ll not discuss this here,” Mom replied. She placed the tampons back on the wrong shelf and hefted a bulky box of 60 Modess sanitary pads on top of the pile of food. A big box was always the better buy. “You will use these, and you will be grateful for them,” she said. “When I was your age there was a War on, and no one but the WRENs were issued sanitary pads.”

“I made do with pieces of terry cloth torn from old towels,” she continued, standing perfectly still in the middle of the aisle while I cringed myself into invisibility. Thank God the store was deserted. “I washed them by hand and hung them on the line and used them over and over and over again. So I’ll not listen to any complaints you have about using disposable pads that you drive to the supermarket to purchase, and throw away after one use. You’ll forgive me if I don’t consider it a tragedy for you to miss out on one or two days swimming in your very own backyard swimming pool.” California might not be the Paradise on Earth Mom had once envisioned, but she still held great faith in its symbols, swimming pools and orange groves being chief among them.

We rolled silently through the wide aisles after that. Mom walked ahead, tossing cardboard boxes of Shredded Wheat, Skillet Lasagne and Rice-a-Roni into the cart while I steered. We finally got to the produce section, decorated with cardboard cut-outs of orange maple leaves and overflowing Thanksgiving cornucopias, even though it was August. Seasons felt arbitrary here. In the land of endless summer, fire, flood and earthquake cycles replaced the more traditional winter, spring and fall.

Mom rolled past the artfully stacked pyramids of plums and peaches without choosing a thing. She preferred her fruits and vegetables straight from a tin.

On to Frozen Foods. Mom threw three plastic bags of peas into the cart, and two of corn. “Why will your father not grow maize in his garden?” she complained for the thousandth time. “A perfectly useful vegetable, unlike those ghastly aubergines he insists on raising.”

“Mo-om,” I whined, “they’re called eggplant in this country, and they’re good for you, and I really like them.”

Mom whipped her head around and gripped hold of my upper arm. “We may live in this country,” she hissed, “but you would do well to remember that you were not born here. I’ll not have my children speaking like vulgar American teenagers.” If she thought an elongated “Mo-om” was vulgar, she should have heard the words we heard at school. From the teachers.

The cramps started as soon as I reached the car. A gripping, amorphous pain embedded so deeply in my body, it was impossible to pinpoint where and when it began. A phenomenon that made me wonder if maybe it wasn’t really there at all. Except that it was.

We drove the quarter mile home in silence. Mom called for Dad to come help unload the groceries from the back of the station wagon. He grabbed three bags at a time and bounded up the back steps. He was in an especially good mood today. I was afraid to wonder why.

Dave showered while Dad and I put things away. Time for Mom to drive him to karate. Dave had a very busy schedule – martial arts, baseball camp, three afternoons of weight training at a local gym. I had a library card.

After they left, I went to the bathroom and grabbed a handful of sanitary napkins from under the sink. I pulled the paper tabs of one through the metal hooks of the elastic belt that left angry red welts in the flesh around my hips, and put on two sets of underwear, hoping to keep the fluid that inevitably leaked down the sides of the pad from staining my shorts where people could see. Could I get away with cut-offs and a bathing suit top at the party, or was that just way too obvious? If I was even allowed to go. Mom didn’t like us having friends who lived in apartment complexes.

I sat on my bed and tried to read, but the pain made it hard to concentrate. I went to the bathroom in the hallway and filled a hot water bottle with the hottest water I could get from the tap. If only Mom were home. She would’ve filled it with scalding water from the kettle, then wrapped it in a tea towel so I could lay it on my stomach without getting burned. She’d help me get under the covers, then bring in a tray with a mug of milky tea and a plate of buttery toast fingers, and after a while I would feel better. Today Dad was out there somewhere, and I definitely didn’t feel like talking to him. Maybe he would leave soon. There was nothing better than having the house to myself.

I tried to read my paperback copy of The Exorcist , but finally the pain got so bad that I gave up and wandered into the kitchen. Dad was there, emptying the breakfast dishes from the dishwasher.

“Hi, sport,” he said, still in that good mood.

“Hi,” I mumbled, sitting on a stool at the counter.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Have any plans for the day?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Feel like a swim?” he asked.

“Can you just stop asking me questions?” I snapped. “I don’t feel like swimming, okay?”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Want to help me make some brownies, then?” He covered his mouth with his hand. “Ooops, sorry. That was another question.”

I almost smiled. “Brownies?” I replied instead, sarcasm oozing from my voice. “How hard can they be to make?” Squeeze some brown goo out of a plastic cylinder and bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Mmmm, mmmm good.

“A friend of mine’s in the hospital, and I thought I’d bake him a batch of brownies,” Dad said quietly. “Helping might make you feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“Okay. I just thought that maybe you were having cramps or something. Your mother had a terrible time with them before her hysterectomy.”

Oh yeah, these were exactly the words I wanted to discuss with my father. Cramps. Hysterectomy. Mom. “Let’s make some brownies then,” was all I could think of to say.

Dad approached baking as if it were a scientific experiment. He set out a row of seven identical Pyrex bowls, and carefully measured each ingredient into them. Three sticks of butter in one. Four squares of dark chocolate in the next. Two cups of sugar, each in their own bowl. Four eggs. “You have to think ahead,” he said, “because the eggs and the butter should be at room temperature before you begin to mix anything together.” I wanted to know why, from a chemical point of view, but I was afraid to ask, so I never found out.

One cup of flour, carefully scraped across the top so that the measurement was exact. “You can’t double this recipe,” he cautioned. “If you want to make two batches of brownies, you have to measure two separate sets of ingredients.”

He measured one teaspoon of vanilla extract and half a teaspoon of salt into tiny Pyrex beakers. Then he brought out a bag of pecans and chopped them up with a large, thick-handled knife. All I had done so far was watch.

He turned the oven on, got out a Pyrex baking dish and some foil. He tore off two long pieces, and neatly lined the glass pan with them, shiny side up. “This makes the clean-up easier,” he said. “Are you ready to help?”

I nodded.

He adjusted the gas flame under a heavy saucepan, cut the sticks of butter into squares and tossed them in, followed by the chocolate rectangles. He handed me a wooden spoon and said, “Stir!”

“Always use a wooden spoon,” he instructed, “because it doesn’t conduct heat, so you won’t burn your hand. Some people like to use a double boiler when they’re melting chocolate, but the slightest bit of moisture, even from the rising steam of the water below, can make the chocolate seize up and tighten into a blob, and then it’s useless. Now, if I were at the lab, I’d use the microwave oven to melt the chocolate in no time at all. But since your mother won’t allow one in the house, this way is fine, too.” That’s what he did at work all day? Baked brownies? I thought he was curing cancer, or chlamydia, or cholera. I knew he was obsessed with something that began with a c, and I didn’t think it was cannabis.

“Keep stirring, and tell me when it’s all melted together.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“Who’s in the hospital?”

“Gus,” he said. “A friend from the Army. He has cancer, and he’s at the V.A. in Westwood. I go see him every Tuesday.”

“Is he going to die?”

“I hope not. He might lose a leg, though. Keep stirring. Chocolate can burn in an instant. I’ll be right back.” He stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer and strode out the back door. Dad was tall and thin, with prominent cheekbones and a hollow look around his dark brown eyes that sometimes made me feel afraid.

He came back with a bowl of dried oregano leaves that he mixed in the blender until they were almost powder. I loved the spaghetti sauce he made with the herbs and tomatoes from his garden. One pound of ripe Brandywines simmered in a pan with a pound of butter then poured over linguine and topped with fresh basil was my favorite meal. He came up behind me and said “Keep stirring,” as he lifted the pan off the burner and onto a ceramic trivet that said “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”

He added the sugar and eggs. “Keep stirring,” he said again. “You’ve got to get all these ingredients mixed up together before it cools.” It was hard going. My arm ached, and he made things worse by dumping in a bowl of flour. When I sneezed, he laughed and told me to turn my face away from the food, Gus was sick enough already. Then he picked up the tiny beakers of vanilla and salt and added them in with a flourish. “Keep stirring!” he exhorted, “we’re almost done.” A shower of pecans fell into the pan. “Stir! Stir!” he cried and then, suddenly, “Stop!”

I backed up and we looked down at our creation, creamy and rich, shiny as glass in the dull black saucepan. “Perfect!” he pronounced. “Now for the final ingredient.” He poured the pulverized oregano onto the beautiful chocolate batter, ruining its buttery sheen with the dusty olive-green powder.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted.

“That’s the cannabis,” he said, mixing it in with the wooden spoon. “Our secret ingredient.”

“You mean marijuana?” I accused.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” he said, pouring the batter into the foil-lined pan and slipping it into the pre-heated oven.

“But that’s illegal.”

“Of course it is. That’s why we’re hiding it in the brownies.” I began to cry.

“Oh, honey, don’t.” Dad hated to see me cry, so I never did when he was around. Mom didn’t seem to mind, so I hardly ever cried around her, either. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t want you to grow marijuana,” I sniffed. “I know that Hugh Hefner thinks it’s cool, but Dear Abby says that it makes you shoot up heroin, and then you’ll get arrested and go to jail, and we’ll never get to see you.”

“I’m not going to use heroin, and I’m not going to jail,” he said softly. “Cannabis is a medicinal herb that’s been used for centuries. Gus needs it to control the nausea from his chemotherapy. Nothing else works for him. I smoke it to relax. You could use it to make your cramps feel better.”

“I do not have cramps!”

“I’m going to tell you something that’s going to make you laugh.” An old game from when I was a little girl. He would tell my it was okay to cry as long as I knew I wasn’t allowed to laugh, and then there was nothing I could do to keep from giggling.

“What?”

“Marijuana is safer than chocolate.”

“It is not!”

“Sure it is. Chocolate is full of sugar and fat and caffeine. You think it’s making you feel better, but really it’s making you anxious and overweight.”

The oven timer buzzed, signaling that the brownies were done. Dad took them out with a lemon-shaped pot holder, and immediately put the hot pan into the freezer, where it created a cloud of frosty steam. “They’ll cool faster this way,” he said. “Twenty minutes in the freezer equals one hour in the fridge. Help me get rid of the evidence. Your mother will have a fit if she sees all these dirty dishes.”

He washed and I dried until everything was put away and the kitchen was back to its natural state. Meaning that it looked as if no one had ever actually used it for the cooking or serving of food.

“They should be cool enough to cut now,” Dad said, pulling the foil lining out, revealing a perfectly clean pan underneath. “Put that back in the cupboard,” he said, “and hand me the pizza cutter.”

He laid the slab of brownie on the butcher block cutting board and rolled through it with the round blade, making a perfect grid of 1-inch square pieces. “I just stick them in this shortbread tin, smile at the nurses, and Gus is free of nausea for another week.” He popped one in his mouth and offered me the tin. “You want one?”

“No thanks, I don’t want to break out.”

“Chocolate will not make you break out,” he said. “I read a study just last week that claimed that the only foodstuff that has been clinically proven to aggravate a condition of adolescent-onset seborrhoea is kelp. As in seaweed. And I guarantee you there is no kelp to be found in these brownies. You saw how careful I was with the ingredients.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You know I have no sense of humor,” he said with a smile. I knew no such thing, but I did know that he never joked about anything pertaining to science. So I had one brownie.

“You won’t get high the first time anyway,” Dad said as he reached for another one. “But it might help with your cramps.”

“I don’t have cramps!” I shouted, as my stomach convulsed. “I’m just a little bit hungry.” Six brownies later, I thought that maybe I felt a little bit high.

“These are the best brownies I’ve ever tasted,” I said. I wasn’t tasting mouthfuls anymore, I was savoring crumbs. Each morsel seemed to have its own unique burst of flavor that blended with its fellow-crumbs and melted into chocolate nectar on my tongue, which, by the way, seemed to have swollen to twice its natural size. Gosh, I thought, it really makes a difference when you bake things from scratch.

“That’s why you have to bake the brownies from scratch,” Dad said. Was he reading my mind, or had I said that out loud? “You have to use extra butter, because the active ingredient, the tetrahydrocannabinol, is an oil-soluble agent that binds to the butter in the batter. The more butter you use, the faster the chemical can be absorbed and utilized by your system.”

All I heard was the word butter. The butter in the batter. Had Shakespeare ever written anything more beautiful? I could feel its sweetness on my tongue; I wanted to say the words over and over and over again. The butter in the batter. Pressing my lips together to form the “B” sound felt like the beginning of a kiss. The butter in the batter. I wondered if eating marijuana brownies gave a person bad breath, and if I would ever meet anyone who would want to kiss me on the mouth.

“There’s no such thing as bad breath,” Dad said. Yikes! I thought. I know I didn’t say any of that out loud. All I’d done was hold my palm up to my face and breathed out through my mouth, and then breathed in again through my nose really fast, in an effort to detect any unpleasant odor. The rapid intake of oxygen gave me a head rush, although I didn’t know until much later that that was what it was called.

“Breath is life,” Dad continued, “and spirit, so how can it be bad?” An excellent point. “Did you know that in every breath you take, you are breathing in at least one molecule of oxygen that has previously been breathed in and out by every single human being who has ever lived on the planet?” What was he talking about? “That’s how big, and how small, the universe is. We are all connected, every person on Earth, by the oxygen we need to sustain our lives. Imagine, right now there is a molecule in your body that has previously circulated through the mind and heart of Einstein, Galileo, Michelangelo, Picasso.”

“And Marie Curie, and Jackie Onassis, and all four of the Beatles!” I said.

“That’s right,” he agreed.

And Hitler and Ho Chi Minh and Spiro Agnew, I thought, but didn’t say. Dad seemed so happy. I wanted to go back to thinking about butter.

“I think we should start baking our own bread,” I said.

“That’s an excellent idea,” Dad agreed.

“What’s an excellent idea?” asked Mom from the back door.

“We’re thinking about baking our own bread,” Dad said. I sat in my chair with my eyes squeezed shut, trying to hold back the tears and giggles that simultaneously threatened to engulf my body. Why did making bread sound so funny, and so terribly, terribly sad, all at the same time?

“I bought bread this morning,” Mom replied. Dave came in behind her and reached for a brownie. “No, you don’t,” Mom said, snatching it out of his hand. “You heard what Coach said about regulating your sugar intake.” The tears won out.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mom frowned.

“I have cramps,” I said. “I think I’d better go to my room and rest.”

“Me, too,” Dad said. “I mean the part about the rest. I could use a nap before my lecture.” He put the remaining brownies in the tartan tin and carried it out of the room.

I slept until nine o’clock the next morning. When I woke up, the cramps were gone.

I miss the melanomas the most. That’s what I call them. They used to spread across the city sky in smog traced masquera smears that looked like mosquito wings caught in the honey of a red web, thin and frozen mid flap. I keep believing that the sky continues to freeze for what could go on forever before finally releasing into the sloppy residue of an old man’s soft whimpering, which has ebbed as long as I can remember from a bedroom at the end of a hallway where I always resign myself to standing. At the edge of dim lights, facing it as if it were his very throat and I the impregnated answer to his sorrow, the waiting receptacle of the sky’s red ashes.
I want to be these things.

Facing my father and facing the sky, in my suddenly little fists I hold the same red ink tracing the wrinkled lines inside my palms, as the rubbery wiggles on my mother’s corpse arm, and in my little memory, the vision of a sky that surprised me like the smell of her dying flesh lying on the table while I listen numbly along with her to a television that was to have brought salvation. It is rotted and crumbling around me as her arm dies like fruit on the table, and we all watch it, including the House, including God. The House and my suit, and with us always the inevitability of all our autumns. When she comes to me I will refuse to hold her small body, and I will understand age and the resilience of organs as material stressed to the point of a loud splintering from which no soft human surface will be saved.
What would she feel besides the intrusion of a cardboard corner, the cold surface of my rectangular chest, the small fuzz of my square cheek, wanting only to be the color of the sky. And then comes the brutal realization that the sky hides its true color behind pageantry. And that the real sky lays flat above us in a state of beyond-us. It woos the simple minds of men into writing poems for the very women who will eat their paper and call them cowards for not being able to deliver their love in speech, where all our stupid slips of the tongue live on forever in a dimension untouched by the crisp air of autumn and the changing of the leaves. Their sweeping and their collecting into piles for public burning. All their life having dried out with the last wheezing gasps of a cruel autumn’s end, and all the love and hope inside the yellowing skins of our bodies shriveled also, thin, silent, and ready for fire to become ash.
Existence is forever there, no matter what time may prove to our faces. The desire for forever is her suicide, and at that moment she will know that it is the only way out of a long suffering we will all have to endure. She thinks of death as only a mother can.

EMOBOT

God is dead, laying somewhere, catacomb in his plastic sheath, his florescent skin, and as far as I know the cancer in the sky has finally killed all the blue over another city also. All that blue I had given up. Replaced it with red, this much I know almost for certain.
Felipe walked back and forth across the body length mirror in his room wearing his cardboard robot suit. Scatterings of cardboard lay about the carpet like eggshells. The sound of the television echoed in the space of his helmet, his new head. He slowly turned it around to show sadness, the eyes cut at slants to show painful confusion, the mouth curved downward to express isolation, the abuse of vulnerability and of the basic innocence that holds humanity together in simple functions of trust. Sadness was his painting. God ran his hand across it, as if trying to erase it, but weakness dominated His body. With His hand consumed by it, He could just only barely graze the paper surface. Felipe felt His touch smooth across, and closed his eyes. The grazing whisper consumed him in return, momentarily filling Felipe with the same ash and dust, and his body crumpled slightly inside his armor, his robot shell slumping into the limits of his thighs, shoulders and neck. On the other side of Felipe’s robot head, His fingers caught the trimmed edges of another expression, anger, the triangular eyes, the jagged mouth showing aggression and the willingness to use it. Somewhere inside its serrated teeth, Felipebot made God’s fingers its own, His disease its oil and his blood.
God tilted his head and looked after the scattering of dead cardboard from the corner of His slowly closing eyes, as if watching leaves and waiting for them to turn one last time. He died like only He had lived, as only a God can.

gods

One morning while J. drank coffee at his small kitchen table, he noticed something different in the way the sky was blue. It had not yet moved across his window to show him the yellow burn of afternoon in the city, when the sun is hot and the sky clear, everyone’s eyes masked or tear stricken. J. had also tried to kill himself at some moment between the night before and early morning, and somewhere inside the storm in his mind where he saw a large pair of hands reaching out for him he had a vision of the sky, which he saw now clearly and tangibly outside the window of his small kitchen, the rest of his small apartment sitting uncomfortably behind him unsure of how to deal with him that morning. It was not the sky at the hour when he tried to end his life, which was then black and might as well have not even been there on such a night where a sad drunken man feels like entering the waters of suicide’s ocean. But the vision was of a sky he remembered once. Perhaps even, I made it up, he thought to himself, sipping his coffee strenuously as the pain in his throat stretched across in nets of barbwire the coffee burned and corroded on its way down.
Once, maybe I made it up, just outside the city of El Santo Salvador de Gente, Libertad y Amor, which the people called simply San Salvador, he was held by his mother on a beach. It was only a few days after his birth. His father held a camera, and his grandparents, whom he would never be able to remember alive were also there sitting on a blanket, which now as an adult he kept in a closet. Behind her, behind him, the sky looked on over them. He remembered it as if it were a picture, J., you have picture to prove it, and he would always think of the sky to have been the face of God, his face spread across the small universe there inside his own tiny hand, in between his fist and his mother’s finger being choked by a grip he would re-enact years later on himself. Blue gave the impression of His eye, His blink. His vigil was the casual but constant turning of the earth. God was once the sky, and He watched over us then, and He watched over us then.
Behind his father, distracted with his camera, and behind his grandparents, distracted by the whistling idleness of death collecting shells behind them, waiting for them, the city of San Salvador slowly began to smoke. Gray columns began to rise from in between the tall white and silver buildings. God noticed the birds mostly, flying away in frantic patterns. San Salvador burned inside itself. The city exploded. The city bled. And God, dragging his hand over J.’s grandparents, scooping them up, retreated like the waves behind him, and that is the moment immortalized in photograph, everyone frozen the instant a city vomits its promises into the public gutters of time, and God leaves because of the atrocious smell and the inconvenience of not sharing in the same desire for self-destruction.
That was the sky then. J., sitting with his coffee and some of his shame looked into the sky outside his kitchen window and smiled. In his suicide, he had seen giant hands reaching out to him, and they made a deal with him. J. did not die. God had returned. Cities would no longer burn.

sky

¿Y tu qué! ¡Hablá, mudo!
¡Felipe! All the kites and airplanes, all the clouds and birds, all the skies, all the sunsets and then below them the cradled eyes, all the intertwined fingers, all the hands and all the lips. So much love in the sky. So much fear. Felipe traveled inside the mechanics of the kite’s dream as his father yelled demands and accusations, riding the kite’s possibility through the cracks and the half pipes and canyon breaks that composed his father’s sweaty face
From the sky all the bottoms of his thoughts were vulnerable to the stares of the city, exposed and his desires open. Crushed flowers, crushed pastries. Lovers intertwined and then somewhere beyond them up ahead impatiently waiting, their memories muddled into soup, into shit on every corner and all over the sidewalks of a very large city that seems to expand beyond and then more until it is everything. All the hopes and desperate calls roam unanswered and unheard, unreturned to their owners waiting for their leftover halves to rot from the exposure of their flesh. All people here roam half completed, mutants and if lucky, cyborgs, those who have adapted to their void by assimilating what God has let rain down and grow there to their bodies so that the stench of their decay may not suffocate them as they sleep in their robot suits, sleeping in their costumes always with one eye in vigil for a light or a bird, a blue kite perhaps from deep in their memories of when love began for them, when love begins always and it is first realized. And how beautiful that moment is AmaAman…Amante? No. Amarteparamarte, standing there underneath that weak light, the ledge of the doorway keeping you dry and clean from the falling flesh of the smog sky, bits of ash, the remains of charcoal birds, and you’ll be tired, I know. Your mouth dry from its silence. Was I supposed to be the one to speak? You’ll be tired by then, and I’ll catch your falling body and begin to love you in a way that destroys the future of this city I can see in the eyes of them below me now, looking up at the center of blue and losing themselves in it and then inside my dream of being up here.
Below him indeed, in the town, the people had come out of their homes, many wiping their mouths still and stroking their stomachs full of dinner and liquor, the wine drunken in the name of God, and they came rubbing their hands in their clothes, looking up at the sky all of them, the children holding dogs tightly, and the young men and women holding each other, at least on every corner a solitary person, a lonely man crying upwards, tears running across the beams of the kite from their sorrows, the sky so thick and at that point unregulated, ungoverned as it neared death. Tears falling up towards His body and Felipe catching it all in his face by mistake. Everything held inside at that moment turned into the floor of the world Felipe saw. All those whose lips danced in silence, and sang out words from deep inside their electricity the way A. had crushed those dried weeds and let her eyes explode behind their glass and in that way keep Felipe forever.
Then the town moved over and San Milagroso, Diego y Doloroso itself, the city of Pain and Miracles was before him with all its prayers and its demands, all the noises of its inhabitants like mice scurrying about beneath the death of God and the end of sunset as they had all come to know it almost as closely as their mothers’ hands, which will someday surprise you too.
All dimensionality was lost in the sky and the precious heights of buildings meant nothing. Some sort of music ran through it like a child, and his little explosion sent fragments of his small laughter into every blade of grass, every green stalk bending and reforming itself. Every blade of grass returned, all the dead weeds do not. And they hide somewhere in these cities. So Felipe looked for them, for the leftovers of A.’s walking, Amantemiamante where are your feet, your toes like the wet noses of dogs leaving prints everywhere they go, so that they remain even after you’ve gone. Where are the tracks of your sudden electric walking over weeds? What he found were mauled patches of yellow grass cut to the level of the dirt.
This was another city, and A. was not here. In this city, it was he who had left the scars. And suddenly with the changing wind, he was taken to them, the sky pushing his memory into the stench of his past. There he saw her, L. Her long brown fingers holding on tightly to nothing, and regret and anger so deep inside her that it showed on her skin like a mole. She breathed into the air, into the sky that became consumed by it and God, somewhere beside Felipe who was also suddenly sitting next to her, wheezed a bit from the change. His body caving in just that much more. L. Yes, Liztepierdo, Lizperdida is what I’ll call you for now. And you must still be somewhere too. Waiting for me, waiting to sit down just as I speak something into you, and have it wash it all away with the rough fingers of its memory grasping for flesh to make it whole again, a body to place inside a red sunset when our fingers sculpted something out of sweat inside our fingers, and it was lost forever into that breeze that came suddenly where Felipe and L. blew away like scraps into the directions leading to their waiting halves, who must have gotten tired of waiting for them and boarded their trains. Each alone now. Each resentful. The only thing in their hands now the absence of someone else. For Felipe A., for L. who knows. And he prayed that it wasn’t him, Felipe in the sky riding the cradle of a blue kite. The moment of its making was somewhere inside the color blue. His father’s face was there. The last image of his crumpled mother crying over her arm and over God was there. Even in the sky, there was something inside its color. What was it?
What is it? Doubt kills the future. Doubt kills the future. What is it then? Where am I? Who am I looking for? Amantemiquerida sits somewhere waiting for me, and she is silent. A. sits, unable to remain still, talking with a man without a face and with a voice only she can hear. A. talks without stopping to this man. She mows him down the way Felipe saw her do silently to a patch of dry mustard weed stalks. She has always been silent with him. She will not love me, she will not wait for me to return and catch her as she falls, and my momentum towards an empty spot beneath her door will make me fall over. I will crash into the asphalt, and then beyond that, my shattered body will fly in fragments into the black of night. I will not see the sky again. Sunsets will no longer exist.
As he soared inside the kite, looking down from the sky, he began to see curbed expectation in the half steps and half kisses of people in the city, as if the end of God above them was far greater than the small whisper of the kite’s flapping. They had all run up to it, to the sky, to each other. When they reached themselves, when they raised their hands into the wind to scoop small bits of sky to feed each other like grapes and seeds, all they tasted was the bitterness of ash, suffocation from a tasteless storm of dust in their mouths and coating their lips so that even their tongues could not wipe it away.
She is indifferent even to this spectacle.
Around him the sky crumbled and the kite dropped like a leaf, a blue leaf that in the absence of the sun turned crimson, then purple as it landed into his father’s giant, waiting hands. Rigodía cradled the kite in his arms, and softly sang to him as Catalán watched from the window sill and cradled her cancer privately also without sighing, without feeling anything close to what her husband gave their son as the sky collapsed on them for the night, and God notched one more tally into his leathery skin with his thick yellow fingernail for the first time doubtful that there would be another, and so he did it with great pageantry and great order. The city appreciated it silently.

gods and hands

Power is power. Back to J., sipping his coffee. In a vision he had the night before, he saw those giant hands fading, and in the morning he vividly remembered an entire forest of hands, a field of fingers drying into yellow stalks crumbling like little hay in his own hands as he knelt to the floor and tried to grasp at them. He annihilated them in his hands. His hands were for annihilation, clumsy, strong and blind. All the hands to dust. His own, back into the nothing of his subconscious, and then off into the waiting houses lining the street where he found himself kneeling alone. In his vision one of these hands shriveled sadly and the other lost hope and began weeping. Inside his coffee, he can see them. One draped over a dark windowsill, heaving deeply in its sorrow maybe from solitude, maybe for remorse, maybe you’re just supposed to cry for death. The other hand was off alone and barely visible but as a dream. It is like a small sky inside the cup, which swirls in grains and J. notices how the once continuous ocean of brown becomes a thin composite of a body that cannot hold on forever the more it swirls. Eventually even the white porcelain shows and the body of what was settles like little rocks that, if they were not wet, would be carried off by his own breathing out his window and into the next something, which waits patiently for them. To collect them and pile them up, burn them or simply carry them off down a road towards the next station.
Outside his window the sky shows a dark spot in the middle of blue. It is a cancer. The sky dies. The God that saved him begins his grainy decomposition and the next God, looking up into the same sky, perhaps even also drinking coffee smiles. Power is power.
Nihilation takes the effort of hands in a way. J.’s obsession with obliterating himself, and then later, his fear of obliterating the delicate basket of bones of other hands is the anguish of some sort of power, and moving between two points is no simple exercise of human faculty. J. sits with his coffee and a confessing sky. Wrapped in the flesh of his hands is a secret everything in the universe already knows. Yet, J. holds to it tightly, flexing his hands and his forearms to reassure himself that it is only his, even though he knows the sky cannot be fooled. Outside, life continues, and he cannot call it life anymore. It is something all it’s own. The city unfolds and unfolds, rotates and unfolds constantly and then the sustained hum of its mechanism is finally laid out for him. A calculus, previously undecipherable to the point of ornamentality is suddenly a simple exhale from the body, an inhale, an exhale. J.’s arm cannot relax. The world is showing you how to live, hear it.
The sky confesses its secrets the moment before a city burns. Someone burns privately within it and hears it and it is usually a relief. Life fits in their throat and then it is a breath of ash. When the sky is the dying body of a God, and when the sky has the misfortune of having hands that predict His death, it is not the same. His hands reach out like leaves off a branch, and when they catch disease they whither first, and a yellow tinge of death streaks towards the core of years and years like lightning, nestling inside the heart of an old tree. Like a termite, it nibbles away at every bit of flesh inside, every nerve swallowed and shat out until there is no center, no body. Only a hole where there was once life and everything else is carcass. Useless, all the leaves are lost. They, all the leaves, fall from the weakened grip of the tree, which has no other option than watch them all turn on the ground around it. When there is no shade, the sun devours them. The earth burns with red leaves. Orange. Yellow. Boom.
J. goes back to the photo of his mother and a baby. Once God had left the sky and the camera in his father’s hand shuttered, there was nothing else left to do but look up back into the universe hovering above the city. Her parents were gone, the blanket they sat on shakes in the wind, and the city, a black smudge. She sat on the beach then and ruined her dress in the gummy black mud of San Salvador. J. dropped with her arms down to her lap. His father saw it in her eyes, and fell also. He braced his knees with his long thin arms and looked out into the ocean, which had calmed to a still sheen. I notice my hands have grown too large. The baby confesses back to the sky, which rains long personal poems written on the insides of curled cinders. This is how an artist confesses, the sky assures itself as it turns away from a burning crater, where men and women have begun to run into flames and bite each other. They have begun to eat the stones of their bright statues wanting to die with dignity inside them, solid blocks of history to catch the piercing yell of bullets in their flesh and never burn. I’m also no longer a small thing to have been made only for the purpose of being in my mother’s lap. I see in my mother’s face the slow coming of fear and the anxiety of imagining her son’s arms tear at their sockets and clump loudly on the floor, bloody then, two long bodies like skinned cats with giant hands for heads laying in the middle of a burned city, killed and eaten by the starving.
If it weren’t for hands, we would always all be the same.
One day I will reach into myself with my overgrown hands.
This confession is not enough, and the sky will still die. But the stanzas and smoke begin to lull him, and as he sleeps unchanged under the sky’s reflection of his burning homeland, he dreams of still carrying a desire to nihilate himself. With his hands, he will explode himself. One day, wandering as a ghost, I will come upon a corpse robbed of everything, and I might feel a large bruise on my arm forming. Looking down, he will see that he has no arm, that he has given them both up. It will be God’s corpse maybe. Hands cannot promise this in their solace, their inevitable growth, but they confess that when he comes upon this corpse he will cry.
A man stares up into the sky and sees the echo of an explosion that has yet to come in the center of a small gray cavity in the middle of blue. A man stares up and dreams of being bodiless. Maybe the beauty inside him will carry on. Maybe it won’t. He will rise from his knees, where he has been cradling the ash left behind by a small fire in which he has burned all the artifacts of his memory. He will rise from his kneeling, which he has used for prayer and for begging. He will move on from where he has stopped.
J. stares into his coffee and sees one of his hands inside it. The other has floated away into the sky, headed directly towards the center of where everyone is headed. A gray patch in the middle of blue, and from his wrists cut cleanly where his hands once began like trees, incredible blood flows onto the table and begins running off the side. He himself falls over like a leaf gliding gently from a dying branch. When the first leaf falls, no one can tell the tree is dying. But the tree must already know it means death before the leaf even lands, and it watches helplessly while its little hand leaves it towards a future marked by a small pile of dust. Looking up from the floor of J.’s little kitchen, he watches blood rain off the table. J. can only think of his mother and how her hands will break when, through the paper of the photo, she’ll try to pick his body up from her lap, because he has become a large block of what was once her house, a hot stone painted on one side, raw on the other, jagged and fleshy. The ocean and then the beach will fade from her mind, and it will become his kitchen floor bathed in blood. Years will trail behind her, shadows solemn and grim. The future is the sight of her son lifeless and blue on the floor, and it will come to her through the open window in the noise of her arms snapping and splintering from the weight of his corpse, because she has always been so small. The pain will make her weak. She will not be able to scream and her mouth will open wide only to not make a sound, and that image will be so frightening that his father will collapse. I shouldn’t have done this. God, will you save me?

2032

It began like this. My mother’s hand waiting like a fever half open on the table in front of the television’s static, waiting for salvation to come through the screen, to descend upon it. It began with her soft hand twice. First, molding me fiercely and tyrannically. Now, her hand soft only, fragilely human. It began inside her again, her hand waiting for me to step out of my emotion suit, my cardboard fortress and finally either declare it in a kiss, or reject it completely with a blink of the open sky on my back moving away from her and ever away into a forever of my own making. The world collapsed where summer and autumn kissed hello and departed, and she and I, her hand and God witnesses, sat in the middle of a sort of hurricane spurred by the static from the television, which had died years ago during my absence. She never told me. She had gone on pretending everything was fine for me. That’s also what the arm whispered in the shaking spaces that had allowed the time between us to move in and fill the house with blood. Only sound came from the television, from some wretched speaker pitched high like a violin and nestled somewhere along the back of the TV. Something whispered from the center of her cancer also, deep in its eye looking out into the event awaiting our arrival. And the earth turned, and the seasons changed. Degree by degree, we neared the intersection of so many cities and their private sins looming over them inside the stretched horizons immortalized only by whatever love or violence remembers them below. It was at this crossroads where tyranny and liberation sat opposite each other slightly bored and only a little bit entertained by the glory of sunsets and pushing dirt back and forth with whittled sticks. In the distances, clouds of dust approached inside the seasons from the momentum of our relentless pursuits of existence, until finally, we were on them both in a sudden collision, an explosion. And it was over, and we, sitting there, fell even further into it.