Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

My lids felt heavy. I tried to imagine Petrona’s family, but the best I could do was picture a row of little children standing in front of a father and mother, all of them with a Petrona face. Mamá said Petrona’s family was twelve total, so I imagined Petrona splintered in eleven. I imagined eleven Petronas mopping the floors, eleven Petronas stirring a pot with a long wooden spoon, nothing in the house because there was nothing for them to lose.

Mamá’s veins and their outlines rose in the air and floated there like green branches, and then turned into the waves of a green sea where a lost ship sat bobbing,

I liked the way everyone talked to me now: softly, like I could break.

Both versions of the story I told were lies, probably because the truth was more difficult to tell. What was the truth? Something horrible had happened. A man had been killed. Maybe it wasn’t so difficult after all.

pockmarked

scandalize

It was spongy and had something like eels moving inside it.

words were like dust that rolled under my doorstep and covered everything with dirt.

When we get married, all these troubles won’t exist, it’ll be you and me and you’ll keep the house and I’ll go to work, and we’ll have dinner and grow old together, and then we’ll be abuelos and we’ll go to the plaza to feed the pigeons and badmouth the younger generation.

She reached her hand out but our hands could not touch. She looked worried at first, then I realized she was afraid of me.

But it wasn’t just happiness, just reality catching up to my happiness.

for whom would I have to put on a brave face?

We shall eat more and we shall eat less. When at dinner you have fire, for breakfast you’ll have water. What is left for time, time will take away.

It is only death that doesn’t have a remedy.

I felt a deep pang in the pit of my stomach and then it was like a broken valve and there was no bottom to my crying.

guilt bore into my skin, into my lungs, and

Petrona’s giggling filling my ear. I was glad I had been the one to discover her, because nobody else would have understood.

I always cut off Petrona when she thanked me, like I was embarrassed by it, but I relished the feeling of having responsibility, of taking care of Petrona in some way, of knowing things that only I knew.

The same sickness that had taken Petrona’s voice now took root in Abuela.

But Abuela’s eyes were milky now, so the stars couldn’t guide her, and anyway, she was like a vegetable.

My hand ticked off the twinkling lights in the night sky, one, two, three, four. Why did I feel so guilty? Fourteen, fifteen. Like every second I felt guilty—but why? Twenty-six, twenty-seven.

instead they were drawings about comets and great natural disasters, always one school teacher drowning or dying in some horrifying way.

Cassandra and I loved crying—not polite-crying, but tears streaming, yelling, bowled-over kind of crying.

We have daughters before you have a mother, Alma. I had a mother before I gave birth,

“Amorcitos! Cassandra, how many boyfriends? Tell me there’s many. Remember to keep many candles burning so when one goes out you still have another, eh?”

I felt like I would cry again, and then remembered I needed to

avoid the pro bono psychologist and in order to do that, I needed to keep my emotions off my face. I untensed my brows and concentrated on counting seconds.

This must have been what the doctor had meant when he said the mind could do astonishing things: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree and believing she had misplaced a bowl of soup in her sheets, and Abuela taking the doctor’s drugs and thinking herself on a cruise.

then Tica closed her eyes and sighed, and her lids lengthened in the sight of her dreams.

I was confident it was the thumb of the right hand.

Little by little, as the car rode on, God’s nail slipped back and back.

The next night, the gray clouds swelled and it rained and there was no moon at all and I couldn’t help but think—

air souring like turning

milk,

what length her hair was.

I admired all the people not afraid to die—except everybody looked bored and unaware of the heroic nature of our defiance.

what I saw was a mountain of city leftovers with people living inside.

Mamá made Petrona recline her head back on the couch and then the three of us orbited around her, like moons around the face of a planet.

“When a boy is interested, always make sure you are the one to remain in power. Men will want to take power from you—that’s who they are—but don’t allow it—that’s who you are.”

“When you are in love, you are in lust. And if you are in lust, satisfy yourself, then walk away. Never do anything for his sake, not until you are sure he is committed. Then and only then can you be nice to him—but, be careful. Don’t give yourself entirely. Never owe anybody anything, least of all the man you are with. That’s how you’ll remain in power.”

the divorcée’s white cloth rumpling prettily before the taca-taca-taca of her machine.

Finally I asked—getting confirmed about what?

“I feel I am made of light.”

She was impossibly peaceful and serene.

I began to see the Spirit of Holy Fear everywhere. It lived in my dreams, in the pipes that didn’t bring water to the house, in the television that showed me Pablo Escobar. It lived in the deep sound of electricity leaving our home—the sizzle static of the television, the humming of voltage through walls and floors and ceilings—ebbing, unwinding, pirouetting into silence. It lived in the quiet after the electricity was gone: the dog’s bark, a grasshopper’s song, the howling wind rustling the leaves of the Drunken Tree. It lived as some kind of imminent sense, some kind of dark wingspan that slowly advanced on our house.

I widened my eyes and felt my cheeks grow hot. I didn’t know Petrona’s mother would be in attendance—what if she had seen me sleeping?

I liked how the shacks were constructed out of random parts. Sheets of wood were made into doors, doors were walls, corroded advertisements were ceilings, plastic tarps were windows.

We kept our distance like we were at a border, none of us with papers.

“Really?” Aurora tucked loose golden hairs behind her ears and thought about this for a moment.

“Well, you know how city people are, always with their stomachs on their forehead;