by Myriam Gurba
Mom walked Ixchel, Antonio, and me inside. We brushed our teeth, took turns peeing, and changed into our pajamas. I climbed my smooth bunk bed ladder and slithered onto my mattress. My big toe tapped the Japanese paper lantern hanging from the ceiling. Round, puffy, and water-soluble, it lit our pink room softly, making it feel like a uterus or the inside of a satin-lined jewelry box.
The Aztecs, a diary incapable of keeping secrets, and a plush brontosaurus were lined up on a shelf behind my pillow. Grabbing the diary, I flipped to an empty page and attacked it with my mechanical pencil. Originally, this book had been secure, its red strap locked with a key but the key wound up in the same place half of our socks did: a purgatory in another dimension. With a steak knife, I’d hacked the strap off so I could keep documenting the things that mattered.
In it, I wrote, July 4th. We had fireworks. There is a rabbit on the moon. I saw him. I believe I am an Aztec not that other thing. Son of a bitch. Son of a beach. That’s how mom says it.
I wedged the pencil back between the pages, shut the diary, and replaced it. I grabbed my brontosaurus and The Aztecs.
Light flickered on and off. I turned to see who was doing it. Mom was standing in the doorway.
Flailing my limbs and writhing, I screamed, “Terremoto!”
In a terrified voice, Ixchel yelled, “Stop it!”
Mom said, “Stop it. That’s not funny.” I wondered how flat my sister would get if my bed fell on her during an earthquake. I could excavate her.
“Mom,” I asked, “why is the rabbit on the moon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“Really. I don’t know.”
“Well, can’t you make something up?”
Mom sighed. She said, “His mother put him on the moon because he wouldn’t go to sleep.”
I asked, “Can we get a rabbit?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t need one.”
“I need one.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t see you carrying out any scientific experiments.”
I giggled. “I’ll get out my chemistry set tomorrow. Did you do experiments on rabbits?”
“Yes.”
“In Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was studying pharmaceutical chemistry, and we used rabbits to help us learn about antigens.”
“What’s an antigen?” I asked, while imagining Dad saying, “It’s the opposite of an unclegen.”
Mom said, “I’ll tell you later.”
I said, “Tell me what you did the rabbits.”
Mom walked over to me. She held out her hand. She said, “Give me Napoleon.”
I handed my dinosaur to her. She held him as if he was going to buck and stroked his long neck. Then, she wrapped her hands around an invisible syringe and pressed its needle to the side of his head. Her thumb pushed the plunger, sending make-believe creatures into a host.
I asked, “Did it hurt them?”
Mom said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s better than injecting people.”
Mom handed my inoculated doll back to me and walked to the doorway. She flipped off the lights. The room turned into an unlit tomb.
Mom cooed, “Dream with the angels.”
I reached under my pillow, pulled out my hot pink flashlight, and yanked the covers over my head. In my chrysalis, I opened The Aztecs and flipped pages till I found the Aztec calendar wheel. My finger stroked Rabbit, it dug in the space between Deer and Water, and a bolded caption explained that Aztec timekeepers spun their calendars in cycles of misfortune: thirteen. I flipped some more pages and found the rabbit again, this time as Ome Tochtli, god of intoxication.
Ome Tochtli got me drunk on fatigue and my eyelids fell, the flashlight slipped out of my hand. I was transported to Easter Eve in Tenochtitlán. Snake Woman was creeping through the streets past midnight, a large wicker basket dangling from his scarred forearm.
What was he doing?
Tiptoeing from vegetable garden to vegetable. Crouching in the vines and squash blossoms. Tripping over rabbits and turkeys. Hiding severed human body parts among big red tomatoes for noble children to hunt and roll down pyramid steps at dawn.
Columbusted
On the playground under the slide, during recess from a catechism class where a nun was preparing a bunch of other bored children and me to receive a Jewish carpenter into our mouths, I was conducting my own Ash Wednesday services. I was wearing my red stretchy pants that Dad said made me look like the only kind of trustworthy Mexican: the masked wrestling kind. In my chubby hands, I cradled an ashtray I had whisked off a dyke nun’s desk. I dipped my pinky in it. The cremains of the sister’s cigar felt satiny.
A dark classmate approached. She shut her eyes. My finger reached for her and smeared Christianity’s favorite letter upon her brow: t. Christians dangle this letter from chains around their necks. They erect this letter in front of their churches. It’s always lower case.
“En el nombre del padre y del hijo y del luchador Santo,” I blessed my classmate. I kissed her on the mouth. I have always been a queer high priestess.
Pedophiles must’ve surrounded me at catechism but they didn’t touch it first: I touched it first. I Christopher Columbused the apple of my loins. It itched bad and I understood that a señorita scratches her papaya in private because I’d only ever seen boys — small, medium, and large — touching their privates in public, and so, alone in my vulvar bedroom, I shut my door and went to town.
In the middle of one particular scratch fest, the tip of my nose itched. I wrinkled and twitched it but the tickle stayed. I unplugged my hand from my figgy pudding, pulled my nose, and discovered that a perfume brewed where I split. I dipped back for more and sniffed. My hand travelled back and forth, back and forth, back and forth from nose to genital cleft, and the smell’s ability to regenerate seemed bottomless. I had struck a lucky abyss. I rubbed myself and huffed my fingers until the cows came home. I became pleasantly chafed. The hairnet-wearing cholos who crouched behind my elementary school’s handball courts with paper bags mashed to their faces, eyes crossed, could not out-sniff me.
Toting a laundry basket, Mom barged in. My hand wasn’t down my pants but my eyes were crossed. My nostrils were flaring against my knuckles. Mom threw her stuff onto our dresser and marched up to my ecstasy. She grabbed my hand. Whiffed. Her eyelashes popped out of their follicles.
“Cochina!” she screamed.
Mom’s judgment didn’t discourage my huffing. It only made me more circumspect about it. More lady-like. More señorita-ish.
I cliqued up with the cholos behind the handball courts.
The Time I Rewrote the First Couple of Pages of The Bell Jar from a Melodramatic Chicana Perspective and Named It The Taco Bell Jar
It was a crazy hot-ass summer, the summer a bunch of raza almost killed Richard Ramirez, and I didn’t know what I was doing in Guadalajara. I get stupid when I think about Ramirez’s ilk: serial killers. What they’re called makes me imagine soggy Cheerios, and he was all anyone wanted to talk about when they wrote me letter:. Did you hear about how Richard Ramirez gouged out this person’s eyes and hid them in a jewelry box? Did you hear how he raped some old bitch? Did you hear how this one guy survived but they used up all the yarn in the world stitching him back up? Richard Ramirez was never going to dice me, but since everybody was obsessed with it, it made me start wondering what it would be like to be stuck with him in a van with tinted windows. That must be how carnitas are made in hell.
Anyways, Guadalajara sucked mango ass. By noon, the Mesoamerican humidity that rose up from the mestizaje throngs made me feel like I was back in my mom. Moist. Unnecessarily fetal. Exhaust from a billion buses and taxis made cobblestones blur, men wearing clown makeup juggled hollow coconuts at intersections, and the smell of poorly refined petroleum didn’t quit in my nostrils. It raked my throat and left gray skid marks.
> I kept reading those letters since I missed home. Then I’d think serial killer, cereal, cereal is American, I am American, I eat cereal, I eat cereal serially. Seriously. Reading those letters also took me back to the first time I saw a dead body. It was my cousin’s. People at his funeral were whispering that he got murdered. I stood near his casket, waiting for a moment when everyone was too caught up grieving to notice me. Once they were, I reached in to see what his corpse felt like. His cheeks felt below room temperature, which is very wrong.
I knew I was going bonkers that summer because I could not prevent dull but morbid streams of adjectives from flowing through my head. I wanted to dam up decaying, drowning, graying, putrefying, wilting, and molding, but they flowed and flowed and grew and visions of my cousin’s corpse chased the words. I was just so moist and hot and ready to stab myself in the head to get rid of language I didn’t want there. I hadn’t packed any shorts but I should have. Also, ghosts had begun flapping inside me.
I knew there were bunches of girls who were jealous of what I was doing, and I was so excited before I left that I even thanked the Virgin for my acceptance letter even though I don’t believe in her. When my picture came out in the magazine along with the other girls who got picked for the internship, all of us with hibiscuses in our hair, everyone said, “How romantic! Girl writers in Mexico wearing flowers at their temples.” How Frida.
“Look what can happen if you pray hard enough to the Virgin,” a bunch of people said. If you pray hard enough to her and beg her and grind your teeth as you beg and threaten to become a slut if she doesn’t let you win that summer internship at Chisme magazine, she will be forced to give it to you. It pays to be an aggressive Catholic.
However, once I got the prize, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it. I rode from my hotel to the editorial offices to the parties and to the dinners with those words that I could not shut off. I should have been all oh my god about it like most of the other girls were. Instead, I felt like all the hummingbirds in me had died. The hummingbirds responsible for joy and language and sanity had ants crawling on them. Eating them. These hummingbirds that had used to beat inside me now beat ghost wings. They had turned me into the wrong kind of birdcage. A coffin for feather and bone.
Hummers
You can’t spell swan without dick. These birds have been acting out since ancient times. The Greek gods took their form to rape girls and did this because the swan lifestyle inspired them. It’s a form of divine thug life.
Recently, in Chicago, a gang of swans flipped a man’s kayak and aquatically jumped him. Five of them held him underwater until he quit struggling, and then their feather fingers let go and they watched him float to the surface. The most King Kong among them opened his wings like a post-fight cholo boasting, “That’s right! That’s right! That’s what’s up, bitch!”
Swans aren’t the only animals that should’ve been kept off the ark. Bigfoot was intentionally kept off the ark. Noah and his family worried about having a cryptozoological creature with such big feet on board. You know what they say about hard-to-find monsters with big feet. Their feet stink extra badly.
On Noah’s ark, they had dolphins, sea monkeys, and clams. They had calamari and canned tuna. Noah’s wife brought Miracle Whip and when the tuna behaved badly, Noah flashed them the pseudo-mayo and raised an eyebrow to remind them of his family’s tuna salad recipe.
It’s a good thing Noah decided to save the clams. Otherwise, the world would have no women. Clams usually get their periods around age twelve. They loll in the ocean and then, pffff, the water they live in takes on a cherry Kool-Aid hue, and the clams are ready for feminine products. Their monthly excretions enrich the water. They make it salty and tangy, like a glass of Clamato. Clams are disembodied private parts. Some are hairy. Others are smooth. Some have hard shells and others don’t mind the barnacles growing all over them.
According to high schoolers, monkeys are the worst. Having sex with one will give you AIDS. According to many sixteen-year-olds, AIDS comes from monkey sex which these teenyboppers will tell you is sex with an ugly person, not necessarily somebody with monkey DNA. The DNA can be human; the face, pure lemur.
Some stray cats are into masturbating on women’s doorsteps. It makes them giggle to cat-come on a lady’s welcome mat.
A lot of animals rape. Dolphins get the most credit for being gang rapists, but raccoons are pretty deviant, too. One time, these two college students were hanging out at a gay male college student’s apartment when they heard what they thought was a cat fight in the parking lot out front. They listened to screeches and hissing until it bordered on hell sounds. The college students ran outside but only saw asphalt and cheap sedans under the parking lot lamps and moonlight. No warring cats.
They listened and heard feral noises coming from their left. They followed the pavement down to the edge of the first floor and turned left again. They stood on their side of a cinderblock fence and knew they were near the sound-makers. They looked up to the roof of a shed with dried pine needles creating a highly flammable mattress. The friends saw a male raccoon, wearing a little rapist mask, holding down a female of his species. She was squealing. He was holding onto her furry shoulders and plowing her with fury. Her opera-gloved hands flailed and she lurched forward, trying to escape, disrupting needles, but her rapist had the gift of tenacity. The lesbian college student felt terrible. It felt terrible to be in the moonlight, looking at the profile of a small mammalian rape victim, and her friend screamed, “Stop!” at the male raccoon.
“Yeah!” the girl echoed. “Stop!”
The gay bent over, reached for a pinecone, and pitched it at the rapist. It struck his side, he let go of his quarry, and she bolted away.
The gay whispered, “Do you know what the scientific name for raccoon is?”
“What?” asked the lesbian.
“Procyon lotor.”
“That sounds like another word for rapist,” said the lesbian. The friends felt shaken, not stirred, by the nature they’d seen.
The lesbian went on to have other horrible experiences with animals. Once, a rabbit made love to her leg. That wasn’t so bad.
The lesbian got a girlfriend who was a white person, and this white person got to have an offbeat experience with her school’s ecosystem. The white girlfriend was going to community college and was taking a break from her geology class, standing by some Monterey pines with a gaggle of smokers. A rabbit was lunching near their feet, nibbling at taxpayer-funded grass. The geology students admired the animal’s innocence till a hawk swooped into their line vision. It extended its talons and used them to lift the rabbit by its nape. It was like watching a more violent version of that game you can pay a dollar to play in order to navigate a claw that grips and lifts a stuffed animal that can becomes yours as long as you don’t drop it.
The hawk ascended with its Easter prey dangling, and he rose toward the clear sky, disappearing into pine branches. Since most of those watching were native city slickers, they panicked. Their community college campus was as rural as it got. One of the students whipped out her phone and dialed 911.
“A rabbit’s been attacked,” she said. The others could tell that the dispatcher was asking a question. The student answered, “A hawk… Hello?”
Something white, red, and beautiful fell near the students’ feet. They looked. From the grass, the rabbit’s head stared at them, like Marie Antoinette’s or Jayne Mansfield’s. It was as if the rabbit’s bloody neck was now attached to the earth and it was part animal, part celestial body.
The event made the campus paper. The headline read HAWK ATTACKS RABBIT. STUDENT DIALS 911.
This story is verifiable but there are unverifiable hunches some community members harbor about the hummingbirds that live in this same city. One person, who shares these hunches, gardens irregularly. She lives in a blue Spanish style home with one tree, a very fertile guava, in its front yard. Around the guava grow astral succulents, cacti thin and fat, and native
California brush such as manzanita and Mexican sage.
It was while trimming the Fremontodendron that the gardener developed her hunch regarding her local hummingbirds. The Fremontodendron had put her in a bad mood. The Fremontodendron, also known as flannel bush, which the irregular gardener enjoys reimagining as a lumberjack’s crotch, releases a botanical dandruff that causes itching, sneezing, and eye-watering. The gardener was feeling the itch, cursing the tree, and hacking off one of its branches, which had grown so far into the driveway that it minimized parking space, when she saw the tiny, energetic bird.
It stuck its beak in twixt sage flower petals. Instead of a sipping sound, the irregular gardener heard a snort. She set her hatchet down on the dirt and watched the sniffing bird more closely. It nervously bobbed from purple flower to purple flower, snorting. With each snort, the freneticism in its body multiplied till it seemed liable to explode like the space shuttle Challenger. Then the gardener realized, This hummingbird has a drug problem. It’s sniffing cocaine.
Each morning, from her dining room window, she watches this overly energetic bird return to the Mexican sage to do lines. It snorts at the flowers, becoming more and more trembly and darting. She puts her ear to the window screen and hears the bird humming cumbias. That is how she deduced his place of origin. He is Mexican, like the gardener’s mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother and her smother’s mother’s mother, and so and so forth.
Last weekend, she watched him remove a tiny parcel from a flannel bush flower, carry it in his beak to the guava tree, and wait. A nervous sparrow with twine in its beak arrived. The sparrow deposited it on the guava branch beside the hummingbird, and was then allowed a sniff of white powder that the hummingbird arranged on a twig. A blue jay came offering string, set it down beside the twine, and he was allowed a sniff done off the hummingbird’s beak. A pelican came all the way from the coast offering a shoelace, which he placed with the rest of the payments, and then he did a toot. After nearly a hundred birds visited the hummingbird, the drug hummingbird took the payments and fashioned a drug mansion out of them way up in the highest boughs of the guava. He hired six crows as bodyguards.