Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Once there was a seven-year-old girl who ate a flower. “Supposedly,” Mamá said then. “But do you know what I told them? I said maybe they should watch their young girl more closely, eh? Keep her from poking her dirty nose in my front yard.”

Mamá followed him with her eyes and said, “Sucio,” under her breath, until one day she stopped doing it altogether, and I had to wonder how Papá had managed to convince Mamá to stop.

Mama is a CPOW

I let my head drop and thought of the dead girl’s leg wearing its red shoe. Of all the years of watching the news and all its images of death, this was the worst by far. The girl’s shoe, like my size shoe, glimmered in my mind. I blinked and saw it, glowing eerily, on the backs of my lids.

Cassandra said those were the rules of politics: you pretended to answer questions without actually answering them.