Lot

by Bryan Washington

We watched them bloom like an opera, a telenovela, the sunrise.

Because she’d known the motherfucker for as long as she could remember. Knew him the way we know the sidewalk dips by the complex, or that if we don’t lock the doors the kids from Sunny Side’ll clean out our apartments.

She’d never tell us what it was like, but scandal transcends languages, cultures, generations.

He’d flip me over his shoulder if he found me at the sink, carrying me away, convinced that it was the last place a boy needed to be. Es solo para mujeres y maricones, he said, because the real men of the kitchen were out killing pigs or whatever.

But mostly we had silence. The kind that seals your ears.

but then the baby died, from sepsis, or pneumonia, one of those things that occasionally happens to babies in some countries but never in others;

You think, says Jan, that he’s coming back. Like, if we all stay in place, he’ll stick his head up from six feet under. We’ll just rewind everything. Click him back into rotation.

Desire don’t discriminate, said Avery. Desire’s gonna swallow every motherfucker out here.

Your eyes will show you what they want to, or whatever they think you should see. They’ll show you a happy family when all you have is bodies in a room. They’ll show you a man worth walking out on your whole fucking life for, a man who will leave you with three kids and a half-rotting lot, but because your eyes are your eyes and you know what you know, you won’t see the train until it finally hits you.

And although Nacho still called him el pinche pendejo blanco, there was warmth in those words from there on out. Not respect or gratitude. Nothing akin to praise. Just acknowledgment. An acceptance of the way things were. It took months for Poke to ask Rod why he’d

It pissed Poke off. All that talk about accountability. Doing the right thing for your family when you could. And here Rod was—fucking around. Over pride.

Mostly that’s how it goes. A half-story, and they’re out. I don’t know what happens to these people or where the hell they end up afterwards.

No matter where you put them, niggas hold on to their vices. Thousands of miles, a whole new climate, and a language away from home, but here they were, dropping scratch for a ball in the grass of some mold-smothered stadium.

just me and this kid and his mom by the window, and for a second it was nice but after a minute I took off because there’s only so much of that shit that can make sense at one time.

I know that even if we don’t always do the things that need to be done, we do the things that we need to. I