Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

“You’re not like other girls here,” she began. Yes, I am, Talia wanted to say. She didn’t want to be singled out, treated as an exception if it meant putting the other girls down.

What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

Lately when they spoke on the phone, Mauro told Elena the news abroad showed a United States scorching with civilian massacres as bad or worse than Colombia’s ghastliest days of warfare, where ordinary American citizens were more heavily armed than any guerrilla or paramilitary fighter ever was. And was it true—he asked—the stories of cities contaminated by the water supply, children killed by police with impunity, communities left to fend for themselves against natural disasters as bad as the earthquakes and mudslides their land endured? How could people still think of gringolandia as some promised land knowing those things happened there?