Meg Sefton's Blog, page 69

A Woman and her Box

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Some experiments by Gisella Klein, flickr

After a housewife spends hours before a glowing box pressing buttons, her hands sweating, her legs and arms weakening, her pupils dilating and contracting, fluids streaming from every orifice, she goes about her tasks which do not involve punching buttons or looking at a glowing box. These tasks, by comparison, cause little reaction. She goes back to her occupation before the box as if returning to an essential fire. Her life crashes down around her, her family leaves, her house disintegrates and is taken away, and eventually someone takes the box away. She spends the rest of her life dreaming about the times she sat before the box. She dies and is put into a box. The box that had been her glowing box becomes a black box piled on top of other boxes nourishing the soil with mercury, chromium, cadmium, and lead.

First appeared in The New Absurdist

Holding Onto Her – Jack Somers

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Matt Briney, unsplash

An excellent flash fiction piece at the Cabinet of Heed. Enjoy.

via Holding Onto Her – Jack Somers

A Woman Rides a Train

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Untitled XXIII by Julia Ortiz, flickr

She had long since forgotten what it felt like to have a man’s eyes on her. She was forty-two, still passable for her late thirties, but had grown used to the fact that men weren’t going to look at her when she walked into a room, that she would be ignored no matter her capabilities, her joie de vivre, her “soul.” How she laughed to herself to remember her past reassurances of older female friends when they mourned their changing looks. These reassurances, she knew now, would have seemed as specious to them as her beliefs about the “soul” itself. How could she have known that so much of happiness was tied to what she had once thought was superficial?

One morning a year after her baby was born, she took the metro to the D.C. Mall. She wanted to spend a quiet day in the National Gallery looking at paintings, letting the silence and the beauty change her or refresh her in some way. She and her husband had lived in Gaithersburg for a few years but she had rarely followed through with her plan to get away from the house, to entertain herself with this rare private indulgence.

She closed her eyes as the train sped away from the station. She settled into the jostling car as it whirred along the rails. She was grateful that even the small decisions involved with driving a car were not hers to make, that at least for a while, there was little reason for vigilance. As the stops rolled by one after another she had to rouse herself to pay attention.

And that’s when she saw him standing by the door opposite. She hadn’t been sure what made her look at him, of all the men standing in the car, with their identical suits, grasping their briefcases and newspapers. He was watching her. She met his gaze. He did not look away.

Was he really looking at her? she wondered. Maybe she was mistaken. She turned, saw the car was filled with people reading, dozing, talking on phones. She resumed watching his blue, almost gray eyes. He smiled at her then, just a small turning up of his lips. He knew what she was thinking. It made her uncomfortable to think he knew something about her just from this one gesture and yet she felt something in his gaze that was innocent, that was merely curious, intensely curious.

She had to think about her breath and to make herself focus on her metro stop. When it arrived, she pushed herself up from her chair. She lurched forward. How very unattractive, she thought. She felt her face burning. She looked at his face once more before stepping out of the car. He was still watching her. He was still smiling. She stood on the platform while the doors closed and he did not let his eyes move from her face.

She wanted to cry. She liked him. Or she liked the idea of him, that’s what she realized later when she thought about wanting to cry as she stood there watching some stranger being pulled away from her. He was curious and he was handsome and there was something shy in his gaze too, something that made it safe for her to like him, and she wished she had stayed in the car and hadn’t been so true to her plans.

Years later, when she thought of the day the man had looked at her, she realized a part of her feelings of loss about becoming invisible had been about a lost identity but also a great deal had been about something else, that something that would never return to her in the shape of her yearning, in the empty space that is left when she finally became no one and everyone, both at once.

first published in Atticus Review

The Day My Past Remembered Me

 

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Woman by Tim Lenz, flickr

The day my past remembered me was a summer day bright and green. Hot. The day my past remembered me I drove my car to a house that once knew of me but had never met me. The day my past remembered me I wore a loose dress. I was pregnant with life and possibility and hope.

Part of my past was a half brother, son of my mother. The mother we shared died by her own hand over two decades before in a townhome not far away from the house where my brother was raised. I had long since, before her death, been adopted and raised by another mother, the mother who cared for me. The mother who taught me how to live.

The house that once knew me but had never met me was located within blocks of churches and universities and institutions founded and attended by the country’s power brokers, the intellectual elite.

I had never been taught by my adopted parents to worry about what someone looks like or claims to be but what they do. About how much money they have or power they acquire but what they were like but what their character was made of.

My mother who gave birth to me hung herself with rope from a rafter in a townhome she had bought to renovate but couldn’t complete, after she left this home that once knew me though it never met me, this home I visited the day my past remembered me. My mother had a PhD in psychiatric nursing. My mother gave me up to be raised by someone else but the mother who gave birth to me fit in well with the intellectual elite. And yet, I have her notebooks I obtained from my biological grandfather, my mother’s father, notebooks she wrote in that indicate all was not well with my mother. In fact, something was very, very wrong.

How to talk about all of this. I am told I hurt feelings when I try. I am told I dishonor my past, the more recent past, with adopted parents who say they love me. But at what point am I able to talk about myself. At what point is this ok. At what point can I be myself.

I have had two mothers. That is who I am. One is dead, the other alive. One could not take care of me, the other one did. Both, I am guessing, loved me. I dishonor no one. And so I talk  about myself to honor myself. I move this cursor with the force of my education, my reading, my training, to spill out my thoughts and make known what is inside. I don’t even know what is inside until I do so. And so what is not talking? Not knowing. What is not honoring? Blindness. Death. Not being.

In Georgetown and Washington DC where my past remembered me there is a push for status and I felt it when I lived there and worked there for a short time and had my child there. I had not prepared myself for what it would feel like to meet the people my mother had been with before she killed herself. My adopted parents had raised me to be hopeful, positive, polite, of sunshine. I had not prepared myself for the dark, and that with a baby inside.

The day my past remembered me I was standing on a wide porch before a large well manicured lawn. The day my past remembered me I was swimming in a city of Machiavellianism, a place I thought I might have tried to make my own. A place I believed in and trusted my own will to work, hard, to make it. One can become anything. I believed this.

And yet, the nurses my mother had worked with me looked at me, me with the face of my mother, and they stared and they couldn’t talk, and that’s when I knew: There was a limit to what you could become. They meant well, they just weren’t prepared either, to meet someone who looked like their deceased colleague. The face, perhaps, the body, the hair, eyes, maybe the voice. I had been told I looked like her.

The day my past remembered me I had come to this house in Washington DC to honor my half brother who had graduated from high school. And the reason why I knew about my half brother and my mother is because my grandfather was able to locate my parents. And so I met him when I was a senior in college. And I heard the story about how my mother gave me up for adoption. His story. Typed out on a two pieces of paper on an electric typewriter. Folded up. Put into a manila envelope. Handed over to me. Along with pictures of my mother and father. Me. When I was a baby. To keep.

And why had she died. Why had she killed herself. Also a story. Guilty, he said. Guilty for giving me up for adoption. And yet I had her journals. I knew she and her father had not spoken for seven years. And while I lived in DC the city of power brokers I destroyed my relationship with my grandfather because I told him he had deserted her. And I told him he was responsible.

In the day my past remembered me in the city where supposedly you can become anything, a sickness was growing inside of me that was similar to my mother’s, the mother who couldn’t care for me, the mother  who couldn’t live, not the one who cared for me and who may feel dishonored by my sharing what I know and have experienced of another family.

The bipolar meds were not completely necessary while I was pregnant in the power broker city but would become critical a year later when I felt like I existed within a tiny box in the larger encompassing darkness of my body. When I was watching a movie with my husband, our son in bed upstairs, and I kept staring at a piece of the costuming in the movie, a shoe buckle, and couldn’t follow anything that was happening in the story.

You can become anything you want when you are writing. You can become anything you want when you are dreaming. You can become anything you want when someone newly in love listens to you tell the story of what you want to be. You can become anything you want when your child believes you are wonderful. You can become anything you want when you are healthy.

When people grow old – child, lover, parents, siblings, friends, you – there is always death, a necessary death. But there is also something deeper. Something essential. A necessary truth. It lives on and you remember who you are. You remember how things were for you. And you remember your mistakes. You remember how you didn’t love like you should have. And you remember how your hate and anger and misunderstanding spread in your bones.

But you also remember the things you did right. How you loved. What you felt. What you experienced. You remember the taste of lemonade and chicken. Your mother’s key lime pie. The smell of mountain laurel, the smell of  your newborn. The sight of art at the Tate. The feel of your back tight as you run to the center of a pyramid, how many hieroglyphic symbols you copied in the Valley of the Dead. You remember how when the sound of cicadas on a summer night sing a chorus of their existence, you are once more who you are and who you always have been. Through many sunrises. And sunsets. Through losses and loves and fear and hope.

And you know how it will end, though you will not die of your mother’s illness, the one that killed her. You have made it through to become yourself and a fully functioning mother who is now in retirement. You have come through this only to be met by something else. But there is always something else. To believe otherwise is to be young or not ill or naïve. At the end of the road: There is a necessary death.

And at this surprise end of mine as I look toward more procedures, possibly more pain and confusion and fear, an end that has been difficult and will continue to be, but one I have learned to weather, what I see now is that there is only peace. And after I have gone there will be new life. And in the life of those I have loved there will be new love. And once again there will be laughter.

 

 

 

 

Demonic Household: Hanako-san!

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More than twenty dark humor stories ranging from hilarious to deadly each portraying a household item with a mind of its own. My story Hanako-san of the Toilet is deadly! Take advantage of the special pre-order Kindle price of $2.99. Today is the last day at this price. Release date is set for August 10. Get your scary/funny summer read!

Ugly Betty’s Fourth

 

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preparing for our fourth of July barbeque, Jenn Vargas, Flickr

Driving back from dropping off her son at camp outside Hampton, Tennessee, she turned off onto the road leading to the cabin. It was the week of the 4th and frankly the time had been less than hoped for.

The cabin was tucked back in dark woods, remote, still. The inside paneling was dark. The cabin was equipped with a wood burning stove and an upstairs loft with a bed. There was limited wifi and not much in the way of cable.

Since her divorce she and her son had developed nocturnal habits with their electronic equipment – he with his video games, she her social media and movies – but in the dead of night here there wasn’t much to do and not much to entertain him. She knew she had contributed to this way of being, this spoiled way, and she had spoiled herself too in constant escapism. It had been the guilt that had perhaps entered in between them and made her a different kind of parent than she might have been.

She hadn’t noticed the gas gauge. She was almost on empty. It was growing dark and before long the car’s GPS fell off of radar. There had been flooding and she had to gun it across a flooded run running as rapidly as a small creek. She was scared and shaken. And alone. Her son had helped her find the cabin initially by using the map system on his phone. Luckily she started to recognize landmarks and used her memory to help guide her choices.

At the cabin, the leaves of the wood were the kind that becomes their most intense green right before darkness. There was a porch around the cabin. Along the front it was tiny and screened in, an airless room. Along the side it was open and big enough to house a small jacuzzi tub, the one compensation. She suited up and took the cover off of the tub and stepped in and was lulled for a moment. And then she worried about what may be watching her, what she couldn’t see – animal, human.

She went inside, locked the door, drew the curtains, and started a fire in the wood burning stove even though it was a warm night. She would sit on her towel in her wet suit and dry out. She was able to contact the dating site she just couldn’t stay on it forever. Only a couple of people had sent her messages but only the bare minimum of what had become the usual. Hi. or Hey. or sometimes Hey gorgeous. or worse Hey sexy. Would she ever get to the point of responding to Hey sexy. She hoped not.

She had planned to write her fiction. She wasn’t feeling imaginative. She was feeling dull and useless. In a little bit she would need to scrounge up dinner.

She took a few pictures with her camera phone for the site. Why not. Her hair was brown and short now because of the chemo. Only a few years ago she had what seemed like a more photogenic quality. Now she looked more her age. She wore heavy black framed glasses that even looked a bit stylish with their heaviness. She had done a series of black and white photos wearing her glasses and a necklace set she had bought when she was married, one from Talbots, a silver mother of pearl set. She was selling herself online now as Ugly Betty which sometimes netted her responses like You’re not ugly! and You’re hot why are you saying you’re ugly! Sometimes people were funny which made her feel better. Sometimes she wondered if that was her only goal.

She had even gone so far as to see if anyone living in the area would want to meet out, something she’d seen guys do. So many guys came to Orlando on business and wanted only a one time or short term dating situation. Or who knows maybe they said that and were actually married. These were the sort of behaviors she had become accustomed to.

A log fell. She propped it back up with the poker and put in a fresh one from the iron basket beside the stove.

There wasn’t anyone in proximity to where she was it seemed. With the difficulty of getting through the woods it was best. And as far as staying put, the cabin was not as comfortable as she’d hoped either with hard wooden chairs in the kitchen where she’d have to sit if she wanted to write at a table. She missed her padded high back chair in front of her narrow and cheap but elegant rustic Queen Anne writing table at home, hardwood and only stained. It was ironic to be away from home on vacation and miss the things you had.

As she had many times she reminded herself since divorcing she was here for her son, this had been the main goal. She had successfully dropped him at camp, though in a fashion typical for his age he hadn’t wanted her to hang around. She sensed this at least. She had brought the dog as an excuse, to save face for them both, so she could leave. She had not become one of those hot cool moms. She was chubs at this point and she felt he might be ashamed of her but she didn’t pursue it with him. Ugly Betty was an apt name. She could have done some things about her state. She couldn’t get motivated.

Really, all she wanted as an Ugly Betty was to meet a man who wasn’t so overly dependent on his ego that he could be a companion. She pictured him smiling at her and giving her a side hug when they were out. He would be proud of her even though she wasn’t perfect. He wouldn’t be perfect either – average looking too, average build or even chubs like her, it was ok, even desirable in some ways. She wanted to have the sense he protected her, or could if she needed this. He would have a bit of a personality combined with a kind of sober realism. He wouldn’t flirt too much with other women when they were out or stare because he understood her feelings and wanted to value them, wanted to be the man she wanted. He wouldn’t see her as a short term opportunity because she had been sick.

Had she had a man like that maybe she could get help with things. The day before, the day of the fireworks, she wasn’t sure how to use the celebratory explosives and her son wasn’t sure either. They had tried shooting them off in a tiny side yard that was barely a clearing apart from the trees and underbrush. She had registered her son’s disappointment. Some of the fireworks were faulty, the rest just simply lackluster. She had bought them somewhere. A discount store which is where she buys everything now, even clothes, canned foods, dishes, and towels.

Ugly Betty’s man would have rounded the fireworks up in Georgia on the way up, big, loud explosives that would take off the tips of fingers if you didn’t know what you were doing. The silence and stillness of the woods would be penetrated with their force. He would show her son how to do everything, letting him take over and feel like a man.

It made her feel good to imagine her man with her now. In fact she got up to make him dinner. When her son wasn’t with her she had to fight with herself to find reason to make the effort. Her man was sitting there, on the couch now, having fiddled with the television antenna. He was watching her backside appreciatively. He liked the way she looked, he had often told her. He liked her Rubenesque figure, her dark eyes, her full lips.

She stirred the garlic and anchovy paste into the olive oil warming in the pan. She had come with plenty of food in the cooler, plenty to feed her son, who ate huge amounts. This would be something her man would appreciate, be grateful for, her resourcefulness. She would make spaghetti and hot crusty bread.

She put the spaghetti pot on full of water. “You know you have to bring it to a boil first before adding the salt,” she said to her dog because her man was engrossed in something he was reading in the paper they had picked up on the way in. “That way you don’t get pock marks on the bottom.”

Never again had she thought she would meet anyone else who might be able to benefit from what she had accumulated over the years, an intimate knowledge of the kitchen’s secrets.

She felt invigorated now, enough to open a bottle of wine she had indulged in to celebrate the successful drop off of her child. She put it on the table covered with the red checked tablecloth she had brought from home, along with other festive décor for the holiday.

She fed the dog who was wearing her Fourth of July bandana.

Her man would hug her appreciatively when she was finished cooking, would smile at her with his twinkling blue eyes, and after dinner they would enjoy themselves in the hot tub under the inky night sky, listening to the few remaining fireworks, smelling the gun powder drifting through the trees.

She wouldn’t think about what was looking at her through the trees.

She would think about what she sees.

biscuits

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She had come late to making biscuits. Divorce. Cancer. A child left for college. She had come late to keeping flour on hand. Buttermilk. Cold butter. She had cooked a lot of gourmet in her married years, and been on too many fad diets. And now it was just her and the dog. And later this weekend a stranger who wants to meet her, sleep with her, the last of his kind, she imagines.

She doesn’t make them fancy, cutting butter through the flour, rolling the dough out and creating a round with a cutter. She melts the butter into the buttermilk, mixes this all in with the dry ingredients and plops a spoonful of dough onto the parchment.

She doesn’t know how it happened to her, her life like this. She couldn’t even afford to fix her oven. She baked her biscuits in a small oven on the counter. What had happened to her dreams of hosting her family around dinner tables. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t even clean her house anymore, a place not even associated with her former life except for the occasional visitation of her son.

She slept with the strange men for free. She wasn’t even sure why. It occurred to her one day she was cheating herself, risking herself, and for what. Not even for a little compensation. All so she could pretend to feel better, pretend to forget. She should have charged them. For that she would put grape jelly on her biscuits when they were done. To take an edge off. Pretend she was special, she was love.

She knew how to take the pictures so she looked better, thinner. She would send the pictures to them to satisfy them, entice them, and hear them say they were interested. There had been a time she didn’t have to pretend and she wanted that feeling back, of having power. One of them had become so convinced of the beauty she had tricked him into, a large unattractive man, he told her after meeting her he believed he was being tricked and brought a gun with him in the car.

She had once polished silver. Brought a whole silver tea seat and dishes passed down from gradmothers to a tea party at her son’s school. There had been enough silver to hold all the cookies and biscuits and scones.

What was she doing now, she didn’t know. Ruined, said Mama. Indeed, her younger self knew so many things. Thought she knew love which now she realized was only approval.

The biscuits looked done, though. She pulled them out, put a couple on a plate, a chipped plate with palm trees from a set she had purchased from a department store one Christmas to decorate her Mama’s table handed down to her, the antique purchased in Texas before she was born. How much perfection there was then, and the Murano glass candle holders containing the white tea lights.

Only briefly she had earned a living before she married and that not too much higher than the minimum needed to get by in her town. Now no work experience, and her looks faded, her age telling. What was there but biscuits. And on good days chili with good meat. On other good days, casseroles.

She holds a chunk of biscuit down for her little white dog who sits on the floor beneath the little makeshift oven. She feels her little mouth grabbing for the bread. There is just this, then. And she marvels she is still alive. Her dog’s little tongue, licking up the butter, feels good on her skin.

She had taken to calling her dog Biscuit, which was not her name. It didn’t seem to matter.

 

 

 

Feminist at the Whore House

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An 18th century feminist decides to visit The Kitty Cat, a modern day Nevada whore house. We don’t know how she manages to time travel but the working girls approve! What will she get up to and what will go down? Only someone who makes history can shake it up like this.

immigrant bones

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Pared de Lajas by Lucy Nieto, flickr

All along the border towns had sprung up restaurants staffed by people entering the country through tunnels further south, tunnels under the wall. The restaurants served gringos. Not completely unbeknownst to border guards, southern neighbors had dug these tunnels to see if they could find anyone remaining from their country after the crackdown.

They wanted to find the girls of their country that had either been: trafficked, sold to adoption agencies who would sell the girls eventually to adoptive families, or third, died and placed in unmarked graves and afterwards lived on as spirits wandering with no rest. And they wanted to find the boys of their country, the boys and the men and the women. Men, women, and boys were in prisons and camps, readying for the government sponsored build out of the wall. They were working in prisons and camps, unlawfully kept there.

Messages from the people of the tunnels would get sent through notes wrapped in tortillas. And if there were flautas, tamales, pombaso, tacos, burritos, chimichangas provided extra for consumption, there was always a guard good for it. And a hungry gringo country was good for a swiveling head turning away in feigned ignorance if the illegals offered dirt cheap authentic food.

Word had reached the highest official in the land that some of the best “ethnic” food could be had near the border. By now there was no more democracy in this once powerful country and whatever progress was made was made only through royal fiat. The democracy had been replaced by a theocracy. This highest royal theocrat, the King, told his court he had some review to do of his southern borders, though all knew he was mainly hungry with that kind of hunger one meal can’t put down but that must be satisfied by a certain nourishment.

The king ordered that the border restaurants and shops ready themselves. They had to pass inspection to exist, though technically, none of them existed of course. What they must do is please him and bring him whatever he wanted. Whatever the queen wanted. Whatever his princess daughter and her husband wanted. And whatever the queen’s young son wanted.

The first border restaurant they went to was in California. The king said he expected the most intense flavors. He said he wanted to taste in his mouth the taste of hard work and toil, the blood and sweat and tears of their people. If not, they would be imprisoned in an instant, never to see the light of day again, to live away from the sun in a little box, a fate that, to their people, would be hell itself.

And so the cooks and cooks’ assistants slaved away over the roasted pig, the side of beef, the buns, the tortillas, the corn, the baking chicken, the warm and flavorful sauces from ripe, juicy tomatoes, and the queso fresco they made with such care from cows’ milk, cows they smuggled through tunnels when they were old enough to walk and fed and raised specially. The king had ordered his favorite: a massive taco salad with beef, even though this Taco Salad did not originate in regions south. The California border restaurant had anticipated this and had bribed a border officer to provide things like cheddar cheese, something they knew the king would be demanding and expecting. The fried bowl was a success, it seemed, and the interior carefully layered with the King’s favorite ingredients.

But they thought wrong when they thought the King was happy. The King was not in fact happy.

He said their restaurant was a dingy little hole in the wall. He said the flavors were bad, just not what he expected at all, kind of gamey or something, wild, something animals might eat. He said the taco shell and sauce has no flavor. He could not taste the hard work and toil of their efforts, the blood and sweat and tears of their people. He said they were ugly, black as night, dirty. He said they made him sick. And so he placed them in prisons, each in a room like a box with no light.

But the spirits of the daughters of their country came to soothe them, the spirits of the ones who had died, and the ones who were kept in hardship but who wandered at night during dreams. The spirits of the daughters of the people of the southern region prophesied and told them of the day of their freedom.

The next border town the King visited was in Arizona. Now it had a sister city right across the border and many of its residents of mixed race descent had been rounded up and deported. Further, Spanish was not allowed to be spoken, and that by royal fiat. The only “Hispanic” thing allowed, according to the King was a Taco Salad, and some other Mexican dishes that would please his family.

The King had been prepared that the restaurant that he and his family would be visiting would be staffed by Tunnel People. But he was so hungry, and hungry for something rare and intensely flavored, he was prepared to make an exception if but just for the afternoon. He was prepared to test them. And so the restaurant furiously worked to prepare elaborate dishes for The King and his family, taking care with the King’s Hispanic Taco Salad that cheddar cheese be used on the dish and all the toppings they heard this King preferred. They were careful to speak their language in low tones in the kitchen so as not to be heard.

“Nom, nom, nom,” they heard the King saying once he started tucking into his salad. “Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom!”

And then when they looked out, he had pulled the napkin from his collar and was wiping his mouth.

But what seemed like satisfaction soon turned to anger and dismay. “I told you I wanted to taste in my mouth the taste of your hard work and toil!” he said, throwing down his napkin so it disturbed his glass. “I told you I wanted to eat the blood and sweat and tears of your people! I am not satisfied!”

And so they were all taken away by trucks and their restaurant demolished by bulldozers, the opening to their tunnel filled with concrete and sealed. They were each placed in a tiny room without light though the daughters of their country came to visit them in spirit, daughters who had been killed, daughters who had been trafficked and farmed out to white families, daughters who served the friends of the king. These spirits whispered in their ears and soothed them, told of the day they would be free.

The last restaurant was along the border in Texas, not far from the camps housing children who had grown up there without their parents, children who were too young to be sold, too young to work, and who were, it was determined would not be appropriate for placement with an adopted family.

It was legend among the immigrants and their country and the immigrants still making their way through the tunnels that the ground had become so salty there, from the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants who passed there, immigrants and their families, the tears of parents and children and the blood from the beatings, that the earth had become impossible to harvest. Frequent trips under the border wall were risked by immigrant workers to supply the restaurant and surrounding shops with goods. The night before the King and his family descended, the tunnel at this Texas border town was ablaze with activity.

Before the time the King arrived, they started the pig to roast and the side of beef simmering over the stove and there had been so much sweat pouring into the ingredients. There had been a steady dripping into the ingredients with the labor of transporting the ingredients and slaving around the clock for 48 hours. The only other ingredients they had heard that the King required and had not been satisfied to get so far was blood and tears.

A very old man, deep and wise and full of sorrow, said he would sacrifice his life for his people if they would just feed this King what he wanted so that his people may be spared. And so, he took the bottle of Mezcal and finished it, and fell into a deep drowsy sleep. Then they pierced his heart so it dripped into a cauldron, and he smiled in his sleep and into his death for he knew what he was doing was righteous. And so he died, and they roasted him over the spit along with the pig.

When the poor old man had finished cooking, they ground his flesh along with the cow’s to provide the blood and sorrow. They ground his bones up and mixed it with the masa to make the deep fried tortilla for the Hispanic Taco Salad. They did not forget to use the cheddar rather than the queso fresco for this is what the King expected.

While he was eating with his family, the workers from the kitchen looked on with nervous fear and trembling. What if this was not enough to satisfy the King? Would they be put into prison, into little boxes of rooms with no windows? Would they never be able to find their daughters? Would the ones who had died be allowed to roam the God forsaken land forever? Would their sons always be locked into slavery? Would their sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles be always under the yolk of a land that had promised a better life but treated them as criminals and slaves?

They watched with awe as the King ate the flesh of the wise old one full of sorrow. They watched the King break off a shell made of bones.

When he was finished he stood and threw his napkin on the table. “Now this, this is Hispanic food! I feel great, I tell ya, like a hundred bucks! Now clean up this mess you folks from your shithole country and we’ll be on our way! Adios! Oops I’m not supposed to speak Spanish! But I’m the King, so there! Ha ha!”

And the King and his family and his entourage left the restaurant. They left the city after purchasing jewelry and sombreros from a makeshift stand. Then they went to the adjacent city to help the children recite the pledge of allegiance and say their prayers.

Nothing happened for a while. This border town restaurant continued to smuggle out notes to prisons and camps inside tortillas with a portion of food made for hungry gringo guards, to bribe them, guards who, in their hearts, sometimes missed the flow between borders, the more dynamic mix of cultures.

Over time, as more information was collected, and the border town was allowed to continue by royal fiat, a graveyard was built and ceremonies held in the middle of the night for children lost and missing. Ceremonies were held while guards slept over so much food made and given them and cheap liquor smuggled underground in tunnels. A special event was held each year for the saint who gave his life to save his people.

And it was said that the lights of the spirits of the children hovered above the town so that it came to be known as Ciudad de los Angelitos.

taco salad

 

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Taco salad by Elliot, flickr

All along the border towns had sprung up restaurants staffed by people entering the country through tunnels further south, tunnels under the wall. The restaurants served gringos. Not completely unbeknownst to border guards, southern neighbors had dug these tunnels to see if they could find anyone remaining from their country after the crackdown.

They wanted to find the girls of their country that had either been: trafficked, sold to adoption agencies who would sell the girls eventually to adoptive families, or third, died and placed in unmarked graves and afterwards lived on as spirits wandering with no rest. And they wanted to find the boys of their country, the boys and the men and the women. Men, women, and boys were in prisons and camps, readying for the government sponsored build out of the wall. They were working in prisons and camps, unlawfully kept there.

Messages from the people of the tunnels would get sent through notes wrapped in tortillas. And if there were flautas, tamales, pombaso, tacos, burritos, chimichangas provided extra for consumption, there was always a guard good for it. And a hungry gringo country was good for a swiveling head turning away in feigned ignorance if the illegals offered dirt cheap authentic food.

Word had reached the highest official in the land that some of the best “ethnic” food could be had near the border. By now there was no more democracy in this once powerful country and whatever progress was made was made only through royal fiat. The democracy had been replaced by a theocracy. This highest royal theocrat, the King, told his court he had some review to do of his southern borders, though all knew he was mainly hungry with that kind of hunger one meal can’t put down but that must be satisfied by a certain nourishment.

The king ordered that the border restaurants and shops ready themselves. They had to pass inspection to exist, though technically, none of them existed of course. What they must do is please him and bring him whatever he wanted. Whatever the queen wanted. Whatever his princess daughter and her husband wanted. And whatever the queen’s young son wanted.

The first border restaurant they went to was in California. The king said he expected the most intense flavors. He said he wanted to taste in his mouth the taste of hard work and toil, the blood and sweat and tears of their people. If not, they would be imprisoned in an instant, never to see the light of day again, to live away from the sun in a little box, a fate that, to their people, would be hell itself.

And so the cooks and cooks’ assistants slaved away over the roasted pig, the side of beef, the buns, the tortillas, the corn, the baking chicken, the warm and flavorful sauces from ripe, juicy tomatoes, and the queso fresco they made with such care from cows’ milk, cows they smuggled through tunnels when they were old enough to walk and fed and raised specially. The king had ordered his favorite: a massive taco salad with beef, even though this Taco Salad did not originate in regions south. The California border restaurant had anticipated this and had bribed a border officer to provide things like cheddar cheese, something they knew the king would be demanding and expecting. The fried bowl was a success, it seemed, and the interior carefully layered with the King’s favorite ingredients.

But they thought wrong when they thought the King was happy. The King was not in fact happy.

He said their restaurant was a dingy little hole in the wall. He said the flavors were bad, just not what he expected at all, kind of gamey or something, wild, something animals might eat. He said the taco shell and sauce has no flavor. He could not taste the hard work and toil of their efforts, the blood and sweat and tears of their people. He said they were ugly, black as night, dirty. He said they made him sick. And so he placed them in prisons, each in a room like a box with no light.

But the spirits of the daughters of their country came to soothe them, the spirits of the ones who had died, and the ones who were kept in hardship but who wandered at night during dreams. The spirits of the daughters of the people of the southern region prophesied and told them of the day of their freedom.

The next border town the King visited was in Arizona. Now it had a sister city right across the border and many of its residents of mixed race descent had been rounded up and deported. Further, Spanish was not allowed to be spoken, and that by royal fiat. The only “Hispanic” thing allowed, according to the King was a Taco Salad, and some other Mexican dishes that would please his family.

The King had been prepared that the restaurant that he and his family would be visiting would be staffed by Tunnel People. But he was so hungry, and hungry for something rare and intensely flavored, he was prepared to make an exception if but just for the afternoon. He was prepared to test them. And so the restaurant furiously worked to prepare elaborate dishes for The King and his family, taking care with the King’s Hispanic Taco Salad that cheddar cheese be used on the dish and all the toppings they heard this King preferred. They were careful to speak their language in low tones in the kitchen so as not to be heard.

“Nom, nom, nom,” they heard the King saying once he started tucking into his salad. “Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom!”

And then when they looked out, he had pulled the napkin from his collar and was wiping his mouth.

But what seemed like satisfaction soon turned to anger and dismay. “I told you I wanted to taste in my mouth the taste of your hard work and toil!” he said, throwing down his napkin so it disturbed his glass. “I told you I wanted to eat the blood and sweat and tears of your people! I am not satisfied!”

And so they were all taken away by trucks and their restaurant demolished by bulldozers, the opening to their tunnel filled with concrete and sealed. They were each placed in a tiny room without light though the daughters of their country came to visit them in spirit, daughters who had been killed, daughters who had been trafficked and farmed out to white families, daughters who served the friends of the king. These spirits whispered in their ears and soothed them, told of the day they would be free.

The last restaurant was along the border in Texas, not far from the camps housing children who had grown up there without their parents, children who were too young to be sold, too young to work, and who were, it was determined would not be appropriate for placement with an adopted family.

It was legend among the immigrants and their country and the immigrants still making their way through the tunnels that the ground had become so salty there, from the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants who passed there, immigrants and their families, the tears of parents and children and the blood from the beatings, that the earth had become impossible to harvest. Frequent trips under the border wall were risked by immigrant workers to supply the restaurant and surrounding shops with goods. The night before the King and his family descended, the tunnel at this Texas border town was ablaze with activity.

Before the time the King arrived, they started the pig to roast and the side of beef simmering over the stove and there had been so much sweat pouring into the ingredients. There had been a steady dripping into the ingredients with the labor of transporting the ingredients and slaving around the clock for 48 hours. The only other ingredients they had heard that the King required and had not been satisfied to get so far was blood and tears.

A very old man, deep and wise and full of sorrow, said he would sacrifice his life for his people if they would just feed this King what he wanted so that his people may be spared. And so, he took the bottle of Mezcal and finished it, and fell into a deep drowsy sleep. Then they pierced his heart so it dripped into a cauldron, and he smiled in his sleep and into his death for he knew what he was doing was righteous. And so he died, and they roasted him over the spit along with the pig.

When the poor old man had finished cooking, they ground his flesh along with the cow’s to provide the blood and sorrow. They ground his bones up and mixed it with the masa to make the deep fried tortilla for the Hispanic Taco Salad. They did not forget to use the cheddar rather than the queso fresco for this is what the King expected.

While he was eating with his family, the workers from the kitchen looked on with nervous fear and trembling. What if this was not enough to satisfy the King? Would they be put into prison, into little boxes of rooms with no windows? Would they never be able to find their daughters? Would the ones who had died be allowed to roam the God forsaken land forever? Would their sons always be locked into slavery? Would their sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles be always under the yolk of a land that had promised a better life but treated them as criminals and slaves?

They watched with awe as the King eat the flesh of the wise old one full of sorrow. They watched the King break off a shell made of bones.

When he was finished he stood and threw his napkin on the table. “Now this, this is Hispanic food! I feel great, I tell ya, like a hundred bucks! Now clean up this mess you folks from your shithole country and we’ll be on our way! Adios! Oops I’m not supposed to speak Spanish! But I’m the King, so there! Ha ha!”

And the King and his family and his entourage left the restaurant. They left the city after purchasing jewelry and sombreros from a makeshift stand. Then they went to the adjacent city to help the children recite the pledge of allegiance and say their prayers.

Nothing happened for a while. This border town restaurant continued to smuggle out notes to prisons and camps inside tortilla with a portion of food made for hungry gringo guards, to bribe them, guards who, in their hearts, sometimes missed the flow between borders, the more dynamic mix of cultures.

Over time, as more information was collected, and the border town was allowed to continue by royal fiat, a graveyard was built and ceremonies held in the middle of the night for children lost and missing. Ceremonies were held while guards slept over so much food made and given them and cheap liquor smuggled underground in tunnels. A special event was held each year for the saint who gave his life to save his people.

And it was said that the lights of the spirits of the children hovered above the town so that it came to be known as Ciudad de los Angelitos.