Two Stories
Maintenance
Rented one of those little one-bedroom apartments that make you wonder whether your luck will ever change. You know the type. Wake up the first morning and you're lying in bed, running your fingernails across the wall. You do this every morning, thinking about what went wrong and whether your ex-boyfriend really loves you as much as he says he does. He calls four times a day, leaves messages on your voicemail every night. He wants to know where you live. You're afraid to answer your cell.
Weeks go by before you realize those bumps in the wall are dried-up boogers. They're yellow, green and black. They must have been there for months, maybe years, left over by the last tenant. Boys can be disgusting. You think of your brother eating his boogers. Every time you blow your nose you think of the wall.
You had to cut your fingernails because you knew some of those boogers were underneath your nails, lodged inside your cuticles. Now your hands look like a boy's. You call the rental office and ask maintenance to come paint the wall. They do, but even though the boogers disappeared you still know they're there. You find them in the bathroom, on the wall between the sink and the shower. Even in the kitchen. You start biting your nails. You get used to it and change your phone number.
Years go by. Your luck gets better. You meet a new man. Get married. Have a beautiful family. You keep your queen-size bed centred in the middle of the room. Your fingernails are always manicured perfect. You haven't touched a wall since.
Border Of My Mind
I warned her to stop using crystal meth. "Glass," she called it. She didn't stop till she forgot to use her brakes and crashed into a Coca-Cola truck at dawn. I slept as the phone rang. Didn't realize it was somebody calling to say she was in the hospital, badly broken foot. Nothing left to do but inch out of bed and head to the hospital--healthy, hopeful.
Can you hear me? I'm outside. Your father speaks no English. Nobody in your family does, except your younger brother. We watch a DVD of Traffic in my car on a laptop, until the battery dies. "Why does it hibernate?" he asks. "Is it a bear?" I laugh.
Apparently some hospitals in Mexico do not offer pain pills. I wait by the bed, while your family sleeps outside on the stone benches in front of the entrance. There is interminable magic in their love. The moon shines for days, as they wait for word. Boxes of pizzas, Styrofoam containers of food and drinks collect the reflections from the glint of the moon.
Your father showers in my tiny apartment; his pocket is bulging with a fat wad of pink five-hundred pesos bills wrapped in a rubber band. Teenage guards make me purchase socks from the grocery store across the street in order to enter the wing with the patients. Your mother cries. If I was a bird I would fly; an owl senseless into the night. Warm wind my only language, dark dense open sky my only barrier.