Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

“Hey, hey, hey, Catalina, breathe,” he said. “Calm down, just breathe.” When has that ever worked?

Unless it is read, a book is just an object. There are no holy texts without believers to read them.

I could not remember a time when I did not want to die. But now I no longer felt like dying. The worst had happened, and here we were.

we watched enthusiasm for fascism take over Western countries one by one without my grandfather at the head of the dinner table in his old military beret explaining how to handle men who want to be kings.

Francisco Ituralde was the third father to leave me, and I was only twenty-one, I was three for three, I was getting a Harvard diploma, and my bangs were growing out nicely. The world was my oyster. I had been abandoned, sure, I could do nothing about the fact that I had been abandoned, but I could turn this ship around, make lemonade out of lemons, I could become the most famous abandoned girl in the world. Out of all the abandoned girls in the world, I could be their valedictorian.