Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“Look, it doesn’t matter, Chula. If you stop existing, you won’t have the presence of mind to know you’ve stopped existing.”

I had this thought when I was five

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.