The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert

by Rios de la Luz

  Even though it’s the middle of summer, you wear all black layers so you won’t be seen en la noche and because you are mourning. During your investigation of the neighborhood, you run into your hermana’s ex-boyfriend. You shove him against coral painted walls. He makes a simple statement about the way you wear your eyeliner.

  “Have you seen Soledad?”

  “I haven’t seen her since we broke up.”

  “Have you heard anything about women disappearing?”

  He scratches his face and pink skin exposes itself.

  “There’s a rumor about the local bus driver. Supposedly, he takes women to factory job interviews in the morning, but he never brings them back.”

  Soledad was looking for employment because the restaurant she worked at was shut down. Your mom was working less and you were having very little luck finding somewhere to make money. Do you think she went to El Paso to find a job, mija? Creo que sí mamá.

  Soledad’s ex shows you what stops the bus makes. The bus is painted like the Lineas de Juárez. Green and blanco como el flag pero sin la sangre. He tells you everyone knows about the buses, but they’re too afraid to say shit. In the morning, before the sun has shown up, you walk to the corner of Calle Cactus and Dalia. The second stop for the bluffing bus. The bright green bus arrives on time and you get on. You shake for a matter of seconds and look up at the driver. As you step on, you see another woman on the bus and you calmly ask her to get off. You grab for the knife in your boot and you caress the blade against the man’s Adam’s apple. You apologize to the woman as she steps off. “Que Dios te bendiga.” This is the only thing you can think to say.

  You drag the man out. He is small. He has a gold chain with a cross around his neck. The belt looped around his waist has a buckle with gold flakes glistening against the sun forming a skinny line on the horizon. You are confused by his willingness to come along. He tries to introduce himself so you slice a shallow line into his neck. He doesn’t say a word after that. Inside the house, you tape him up to a chair and close the blinds. Madre’s TV is loud and you know she won’t get up. You go to her room and kiss her hands. You tell her to let you know if she needs anything. You step back out to the trapped man. You grab his face. Your fingers digging into his cheeks.

  “You drove those women away. You drove them away from their families. Ya no existen en esta tierra because of you. ”

  He spits at you. It oozes on the side of your cheek. You wipe it off and slap him repeatedly on the cheek with the full force of your body. He coughs out blood and looks up at you.

  “I need income, niña. I have mouths to feed. I have grandchildren. Look in my wallet. I carry them with me todo el tiempo.”

  You are tempted to dig through his pockets, but for money to give to Madre. You place a strip of duct tape over his mouth. You spit at his face and then go check on Madre. She ate the soup you made for her. She asks you for water. You fill up two glasses for her and place them on her nightstand. As soon as your sister was gone for more than 48 hours, you started figuring out how to provide for your mom. You stole food from the grocery store. You sold stuffed animals on the border.

  One night, on your way home, you passed the giant pecan tree in the middle of the neighborhood. A pecan landed on your head and when you cracked it open, there were rounded sprinkles inside. You opened more, one of them had honey inside and another had pomegranate seeds inside. The last pecan you picked up had confetti inside and a photograph. It was of you and Soledad. She made bunny ears behind your head. You both screamed CHEESE at the same time. You covered in penguins. Soledad covered in candy canes. You couldn’t breathe or scream. You knew Soledad was gone.

  After kissing Madre on the forehead, you go back to the trapped man and kick his chair over. You reach for his wallet and take out the photo of his grandchildren.

  “I’m keeping this. I will pray for them. You can’t do shit for them while you’re in purgatory. ¿Me entiendes?”

  You reach for the knife in your boot. You place it between your teeth while you pick the fallen man up. His hair thick between your fingers. You tilt his head back and he looks into your eyes. You twist his head around and to the side. You press the knife against the side of his head and his ear plops off into the palm of your hand. He screams beneath tape. You hold the ear between your teeth and grab his hair. You start to slice and rip some of his hair out. Once you’re done cutting off his hair, you place the ear inside his wallet.

  “You will be trapped in a purgatory. You will sit in a cell and you will listen. You will listen to the mothers praying at night for their kids to come back. You will feel what they are going through until you deteriorate.”

  You are shaking and tired. You take the photograph of his grandchildren and tear it in half. You drag him outside. You with your knives. Him with his ear in his wallet and his body taped to the chair. Blood follows you both to the pecan tree. You knock on the trunk, take the man’s shirt collar and throw him on his side.

  “Did you know? If you put your ear to the ground, the tree will tell you the history of this neighborhood.”

  The man is crying now. You’re crying too. You grab the photo of you and Soledad and crumple it in your hand. His crying stops and he starts laughing.

  “Can you hear the joke too?”

  You could never bring yourself to lie on your side and listen. You caress through your hair and start to braid it while you wait for the roots to grab him. It’s only a matter of seconds before you’re both gone.

  MORENA

  I want to talk about my brown skin. I have to talk about it. My ability to travel through shades and spectrums is incomparable. I don’t get red like a frustrated pale walker in the middle of a Macy’s. The internet advertised a different price and things are never easy. I become deeper browns. I become enriched with the blanket of the poor. Those women who wear the coat of bronze as a status symbol of vacations could never sit with me.

  CURLS

  I obsess over the top of my head because it has never been a place of peace. My curls are geometric half-moons with a hint of coconut. They sleepwalk toward the sky while I experience dreams of a small empty house that only exists inside my mind. Follicles jump off to mimic ghosts of ancient insects. Oils entwine into the knots and strays. I wake up in a static mess of lush genetics and fallen strands on my pillow. This is the DNA I leave behind as circumstantial evidence for resisting a tame head of hair.

  ENOJADA

  If somebody asks me where I’m from or corners me to guess my ethnicity, I remember their faces and think about punching their throats when I’m taking a bath to relax. They bleed from their noses as part of the hex and one clump of hair falls out of their head. One patch of hair because I am merciful. I wear dangling elegant earrings when I take baths. I read books by people of color in the bath. I listen to my pulse like Amy Hempel told me to every once in a while and smile about the times I reacted con fuerza in defense of my existence.

  TAROT

  Mom read tarot for the loud ladies next to both sides of our building. She hid it from the Jehovah’s Witnesses whenever we went to the halls on occasional Sundays and she explained to me that it was just a game. I walked into the kitchen and I saw the Death card face side up on the table. I cried before I went to sleep because this surely meant my mom picked the card of her demise. I prayed to god for no ghosts and good hair, but most of all, I prayed that it would let my mother live to see me learn her crafts.

  COLORADO

  The jugs filled with tempera paint weighed more than I was used to, but I was determined. I carried the blue paint in my backpack. The yellow in my left arm. The red in my right hand. I drew pictures of him. The ladies in the neighborhood swooned and became shy when they saw his short blonde curls and blue eyes. My crayon art depicted him as a headless man with blood bursting from the neck. I got a hold of giant permanent markers from the teen boy who always waved at my sister. I walked with a purpose and I kicked on the apartment door. I let mysel
f in. He was sleeping on the mattress in the living room. I started by taking the markers and writing “NO” along the doors and the walls. I wrote a giant “NO” on his stomach and he woke up. I filled the room over and over with the word “NO.” He asked me what I was doing. I’m a kid, I said. I’m a kid. I screamed it. I showed him the photos I drew of his head. I unzipped my backpack and uncapped the jug of blue tempera paint. I poured it on the mattress and soaked the carpet and my hands. I tossed the empty container across the room. He tried to touch me and I screamed “NO.” I took the red tempera paint and I poured it on myself. I took the yellow and I stomped on the container. The yellow paint flowed out as my mom opened the door to the apartment.

  In memories of Colorado, my mother is missing. I ride around the apartment complex on a yellow and orange tricycle. My sister Vero is cleaning the apartment and tells me to stay out until she’s done. She’s playing songs by a woman named Alanis. I know the lyrics because she’s played the album over and over. As I sing along, the anger I can gather from my own voice pushes me to pedal faster and faster until I can no longer feel gravity.

  I kept to myself. I collected ladybugs in a cake pan. Mud was the first layer. Grass was the second. I marked lines across and vertically and placed each ladybug into a numbered quadrant. I placed a window screen over the pan and left the ladybugs out overnight. The next morning, some of them died, others were barely alive. I wanted to tell my sister. I wanted to demand a funeral. I dumped the farm behind the apartment complex and prayed for the struggling ladybugs to continue their lives without me.

  Vero said I needed religion so, she asked the upstairs neighbors for help. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The youngest boy was partnered with me. He read from a mustard yellow book and asked me about the morals of every story. I told him I didn’t care. I only wanted to play Killer Instinct. His eyes widened and he told me he could beat the game without losing a life. I asked him to prove it and he did. We ate waffle shaped cereal and played video games instead of reading from the mustard book.

  Summer was over and school started again. I was pulled aside for tutoring. Spanish was my first language, but not the official language for the school system. The tutor held flashcards up for the words “heavy” and “light” and asked me to repeat after her. The word “light” confused me. I didn’t understand how the feather in the picture brought me light. All I could think about was whether or not the white feather was plucked from a bird or if someone happened to find it in the grass.

  I had dreams of my mother. She took me to Zacatecas. On cobblestone roads, we rode the bus to a women’s prison. The prison was lit by candles. My mother held my hand and then gave me away to a woman in a cell. I had dreams of the blonde man being dragged into luminous rooms. When I tried to look inside, I only saw buildings collapsing into moths.

  Winter covered Denver in fluffy snow. I waited at the bus stop in my psychedelic purple windbreaker. I swore I could see the individual patterns of the snowflakes before they melted into my palms. This was around the time I believed leprechauns could be captured in cups of glue and glitter. It was around the time a girl defended me by lying to the class. Someone came up and punched me in the chest. That was the lie. I was accused of being infatuated with a boy. I sobbed into my hands. The injustice I felt came from alienation. I was the new girl in class. They didn’t even know me.

  Winter led me to build my first snowman. He was short and lumpy. I named him Arturo. I stayed with Tía Lola who collected my baby teeth and put me in karate class. She lived with her girlfriend Isabella, who cackled while dancing at birthday parties and at men who were afraid of her. They loved each other, but they fought a lot too. One night, while I was trying to get comfortable on the couch, Isabella threw an iron across the living room while screaming at my tía. She smashed a lamp into the ground. She slammed her palms against the kitchen table over and over. I’m still not sure who owed them money or if they owed someone money, but Isabella screamed “I am going to teach those motherfuckers a lesson!” She came out in baggy navy blue sweats, a beanie covering her head and a goatee drawn onto her face. She clutched onto a baseball bat and stormed out of the apartment. I hid under a blanket after she left. Days later, I stopped living with them and moved back to El Paso.

  In El Paso, we moved into an apartment with Vero and her boyfriend. This is where my mother reappears into my memory. She had recently given birth to my youngest sister Magdalena who I was meeting for the first time. The blonde man with blue eyes showed up at the door. I froze and the only form of defense I could come up with was to growl. He ignored me and I was thankful. I held my breath as he walked past me and up the steps to see his daughter. I followed. He smiled at the small creature as she clasped his finger with her tiny hand. That was the last time I saw him. He walked out on my mother and my little sister. Even in my mother’s heartbreak, I whispered loudly to my sister. I promised her I would take full responsibility in never telling her what her father was.

  THE PULSE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS

  AND THE DESERT

  Sylvia shuffled through her pockets and only felt a crisp dollar bill. Flaca and Morena had dropped her by the bus stop. They wanted to drink and dance to cumbias in Juárez. Sylvia had to go home. She just had a baby girl five months back. She named the infant after herself: Sylvia Estella. When people asked her: “¿Dondé está el papa de la bebé?” she would simply answer with “El culo se murió” to deter them. The wrath of her mamá was creeping into the forefront of Sylvia’s mind. Her ma, Lupe, worked at a Levi’s factory every day of the week and was calm while watching her telenovelas en la casa, but when Sylvia fucked up, Lupe was not one to be subtle about the repercussions of the fuck up. Lupe had a stack of chanclas in the small closet of the house, Sylvia swore. Her stomach gurgled as she looked into the window of the bakery.

  “Hola, mija.”

  El viejito smiled as his eyes followed her to the counter.

  “Necesito cambio para el bus, por favor.”

  She straightened out the dollar bill which she had folded into a small clumpy square on her short walk to the shop. The little man tugged at the dollar and gave her change from his blue apron pocket.

  “¿Tienes hambre, mija?”

  Sylvia’s belly announced itself in the empty shop.

  “¿Tiene pan dulce?”

  The depth of brown in his eyes looked into hers. The display was empty, except for a handful of donuts. He nodded and headed to the back of the shop. He handed her a sweet loaf of bread that reminded Sylvia of the turtles she would catch with her cousin when she and Lupe visited LA back in the day. Sylvia ate the sugar shell pattern off the top of the fluffy bread and stashed the bottom portion in her pocket to give to the gutsy pigeons outside.

  It started with trauma. Nothing sci-fi about it. No heavenly attributions. Just straight up time travel powers caused by trauma.

  I was digging around the couch, looking for coins. We watched as the adults played “Quarters” with tequila and tiny glasses. I snuck into the kitchen, found the apple juice and grabbed the mini glass cups. One had Benjamin Franklin on it because my oldest sister’s boyfriend bought it and said “Ay pues, electricity is my shit” and the other one had “Selena Forever” on it, in lovely purple cursive. As the volume of the adults elevated into more and more laughter, I poured the apple juice into the glasses and told my little sister Ruby the rules. We had to make the coins bounce into the glasses before we could drink and begin our battle as Orchid and Spinal in Killer Instinct. We missed two or three times before the coins finally plunged their histories into the apple juice and we sipped and dripped with stickiness on the sides of our mouths.

  I woke up before any of the adults, surrounded by lavender walls. The air was thick with musk and fluctuations of alcoholic puffs of breath. The screen door squeaked open and shut. Clicks echoed as it rested back into its frame. I walked out of the bathroom and saw you. I saw you, so I tried to run to Ruby. I wanted to lie next to her and smell the
baby shampoo in our hair strands. I wanted to wake her up and tell her about the dream I had: It was raining. We went digging for gems. She wore my turquoise sweater with the black squiggles on it and I wasn’t even mad. You caught me, gripped my hair and those harsh hands turned my face toward yours. The power struggle that made me stop praying. You were an authority figure I often thought about suffocating. My back hit the bathroom tile. I thought about all the people who find you charming. I closed my eyes. A loud POP went off and I posed as though I was in the womb again. I felt a layer of warmth on me. As I opened my eyes, your body collapsed. Red fluid molecules flooded the air. I screamed and I screamed and then there was just darkness.

  Sylvia stepped into the cooling evening. Her pockets jingled with her step by step by step. Graffiti embraced the payphone booth. Sylvia aligned her back against the phone booth’s panel. The tone stopped and Lupe told her that Estelita was asleep. She better get home soon or she would raise Estelita to be a nun. “Ay, Mamá, espero al bus.”

  Sylvia trembled and hung up on Lupe. The barrel of a shotgun rested on her cheek. A gringo with eyes como el cielo and hair el mismo color like the heroes in telenovelas was holding the weapon.

  “Do you understand English?”

  He spoke slowly.

  Sylvia thought of the white puta she beat the shit out of for telling her that she sounded ugly when she spoke Spanish.

  “Yes, a little.”

  Tobacco particles escaped from his spit. He told her not to scream and pushed her toward a white mustang. Sylvia thought of sharks. Mustangs were sharks of the freeway. Gringos were loan sharks. Gringos were the reiteration of the times she’d been called a wetback. Gringos grinned as though they owned the fucking universe.