Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.

“We’re all innocent,” she said. Sometimes she believed this.

Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims.

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.

Where fresh was expensive, and cheap was a tasty poison packaged as a meal.

new wrinkles mapping old smiles,

The way she said your people—gente como tú—with a biting gringa twang, confused Elena, since she thought of herself as a woman, a mother, just like the patrona.

Her father said it was a gift to care for someone who once took care of you,

Her father said the death of a loved one was like a house on fire. Even with everything intact, it still felt like mere ashes.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.