Living Beyond Borders

by Margarita Longoria

  I close my eyes, but lines still crisscross in my mind, sketching the broken shapes of Mom and Dad as they explode apart. The lines gouge deep into the surface of the earth like a net, fracturing land and water, pulling so tight that everything strains to implode, or maybe it’s not the earth that’s being squeezed but my head and my chest. I try to scream, but nothing happens. I try to claw my way out of this feeling, but Coyolxauhqui holds my hands still.

  “But you, too, were born strong enough to fight. You don’t have to let them break you. And you should never, never do the job for them. Do you hear me?”

  I’m shaking, and I think I’m nodding, and bells are ringing and I’m being pulled in a thousand directions at once, and then I’m lying on the floor again and the kitchen is dark and empty and low-volume music crackles from the radio that blinks to switch from 12:00 to 12:01.

  I stay in the kitchen until Mom comes out in her yellow cotton robe, grumbling about the alarm, and she sees me sitting on the floor with my knees pulled to my chest, and she’s worried and she’s sorry and she’s half asleep, confused, her guilt pulling her apart.

  I’m sorry for waking her, for hating her, for only hearing the anger and not the worry before. She’s looking at me, hands on my face, my forehead, asking questions. My head is still spinning. My parents are still getting divorced. The world is still cracked in so many places, and the cracks on the side of my hand still throb. I don’t know how to tell my mom what happened or what’s happening to me. It seems impossible to begin. It seems pointless to try. I’ve been telling myself that there’s nothing I can do to fix any of this.

  But maybe I’m wrong. I still don’t know if the world needs my voice. But I do.

  I tell Mom I need help.

  And she listens.

  She listens when I say that everything is wrong. She shows me Ms. Delgado’s email saying the same thing, suggesting counselors. She even tells me, weirdest of all, that she’s felt it too. That she’s talking to someone, that she’s getting medication. I never knew that. She says she didn’t know how to tell me.

  When she finally helps me into bed, she kisses me twice, once on each cheek, and I swear, I hear bells.

  I WANT TO GO HOME

  by JUSTINE NARRO

  I want to go home.

  I can still see it, still feel it

  The cuts and bruises on my knees,

  the dirt under my fingernails,

  and the sweat in my hair

  from countless days and nights

  of picking naranjas from my backyard tree

  BBQs where I would go outside

  to pick the chile piquín for the pico de gallo

  and my tíos sat outside drinking Tecate and Modelo

  while my dad cooked the fajita

  of chasing light bugs

  fireflies

  lightning bugs

  o luciérnagas, como dice mi abuelo

  I want to go home.

  A place you have never stepped foot on

  but call it your land

  A place you know nothing about

  but say you have more right to

  A piece of paper

  and it is yours?

  Because it is now “technically” legal

  The gringos trick us

  Promise us better

  All for what?

  To kill mi abuelo’s abuelo

  For a price

  Because it is fair

  Because it is now yours?

  I want to go home.

  The barrio where I was raised

  A stucco home

  with three bedrooms and one bath

  Chickens and cabritos in the back

  Our own natural lawn mowers

  At five years old

  when I helped place the now cracked tiles

  in our new house

  Where I swept the dirt off the concrete porch

  not two inches above the ground

  and played in the six-inch puddle of water on the edge of the house,

  where the land indented from years of our makeshift driveway

  I want to go home.

  You say it is yours

  because it is America’s land

  because it is on dirt

  that is exactly the same on the other side of the river

  with a different name

  The cactus plants that housed the tortoises

  The aloe vera that I would cut for sunburns

  The leaves from the Mexican olive trees that I would collect

  None of which you know how to use

  I want to go home.

  The place where I met every friend

  My first day of school

  and the boy next to me gave me a toothy grin

  and ten years later asked me to prom

  You say I don’t belong

  because it is your choice to make

  where every memory is

  where all my love is

  where my life waits

  I want to go home.

  HOW TO EXIST IN A CITY OF GHOSTS

  by CAROLYN DEE FLORES

  How do I exist in a city of ghosts? By becoming one myself, of course.

  I pull into my driveway after work. It takes twenty-five minutes to get here from Downtown San Antonio, so it is already past six in the evening, almost dark. I get out of my car, and a young boy, maybe eleven or twelve, comes speeding toward me on a BMX bicycle.

  He stops in my yard and plants both feet on the sidewalk in front of my house. He stares at me with a defiant smile and tosses his head to flip the hair out of his eyes.

  He watches me. I watch him.

  Three houses away, behind the boy, an older woman, plump and wearing an apron, comes outside and waves her arms. She screams at the boy, yelling for him to come home, it’s getting late.

  The boy doesn’t move. He doesn’t hear her. Or, at least, he pretends not to hear her. He continues to stare at me. But I am not scared. The boy just wants my attention. He dares me not to notice him. He doesn’t have to speak. He has a voice. I hear it loud and clear. The boy demands to be acknowledged. But I know what the boy really wants. He wants to feel more important than me.

  I shrug to show him I see him. And that is enough.

  The boy takes off, laughing and whooshing past me in a rush of wind. He is headed, of course, in the wrong direction.

  I walk up to my house and turn the key. I am home.

  * * *

  ~

  It is one of those in-between years—

  when you’re an adult

  and you’re working

  and you’re making money

  but you’re still not quite responsible for anything but yourself.

  * * *

  ~

  You have that moment of being out of college, and having the big house but nothing to put in it. And you’re still more concerned with things like going out on Friday and Saturday nights than you are with anything substantial. Although . . . going out on Friday and Saturday nights can be very substantial . . . when you’re young.

  Every night, every star, and every note is pregnant with possibility.

  It is the year between depending on your parents’ monthly check so that you can even buy a pizza and renting your own home in the middle of some ghastly suburb where you know no one.

  The chasm is a big one, and it’s interesting to think that this is where most people’s futures will be born. As for me, computer analyst by day, it is in this house, every night, that I become who I truly am. I smile to myself because I am a composer.

  And starting out like this, filling up your house with all of the things you could
never afford as a kid, most people would be surprised to find out that almost everything they work to become actually WILL happen.

  Not because of good luck.

  But because most people set the bar so low.

  You see, it is into this world, a world where everything is either a disaster or a stupendous achievement, that occasionally a real awareness drips in.

  Reality.

  It makes its way down the streets of San Antonio . . . dripping, crawling . . . through downtown . . . over highways at night . . . under what used to be a railroad yard where somebody once stole a huge Indian archer shooting an arrow off the top of the railroad building . . .

  Dripping still, through the dirty rain of retired businesses that will never be restored (unless through gentrification) . . . winding its way through the grass sitting at the edges of huge research facilities that are so secret (we really don’t know what happens there) . . . through chain-link fences and barbed-wire enclosures . . . over highways . . . and a Suburban Park Mall (with lights that go on only at night when no one is actually shopping) . . . over that . . . and down the streets where dogs bark and echoes are heard by no one (except maybe other dogs and the occasional person who’s been out too late drinking, walking home because they can’t find their car) . . . down into what was (five hundred years ago) an open territory filled with life, hunting, and villages . . . down, down into a cul-de-sac, which no one will remember in the future (because people barely remember it now) . . . and makes its way, dripping, into the heart of a selfish, arrogant young whippersnapper like me.

  * * *

  ~

  I look at my living room full of rented furniture and one vanity that I bought at an antique store, and I go through the doors into the kitchen, which I only enter after I’ve been shopping for food to keep me alive. I can’t even recall ever having eaten there . . .

  Still, I go in, and it seems so cold, lifeless.

  There’s nothing there except for a spice rack someone gave me when I graduated.

  It seemed like a weird gift then. It seems like an even weirder one now.

  From all of this,

  I take.

  Huge.

  Enjoyment.

  I breathe it in—a sense of “I have arrived.” Because when you’re young and out of college, that’s what it feels like.

  I look at my kingdom, my empire.

  The most perfect place imaginable because I turned it into a music studio! My band rehearses here.

  There are keyboards stacked meticulously and cords organized by color. I did that myself.

  And a drum set in the corner, of course, which reigns like a monarch on a throne.

  Along one wall there are hundreds of CDs, all in alphabetical order by artist, and albums, too.

  And that makes this, my house—my home—the epitome of accomplishment.

  It feels pregnant with everything.

  With possibilities. With fear. With the unknown. With everything but failure. Never failure.

  Because at this point, how could that possibly happen?

  But then comes this drip. It seeks me out—determined, persistent—streaming down the street, in the middle of the night, to me—even as I am more concerned with writing my first soundtrack for City of Passion, an independent movie.

  I strike the first note on my 01/W keyboard, or maybe it’s the D50 keyboard, and it’s a good one. And I relish the fact that I am one of a handful of people in the city, or even in the surrounding cities, who really understands how to make music in this day and age.

  I let it fill me. I let it swell. The tone pulses and reminds me of the sound of sirens in the city.

  And I know I could never be happier than I am at this moment when I hit the second note . . .

  * * *

  ~

  Then the phone rings. I answer it. “Yes, Mother.”

  A few minutes later I go back to the keyboard. I jot down some notes about the song I am writing. I stop. I have a problem.

  Am I sweating? I never sweat. As a matter of fact, I have one of those weird, weird diseases (I think) that does not enable you to sweat.

  And I have to admit, at moments like this, in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep (I get very little sleep)—and I stand with my hands on the keyboard and feel the swell of the chord—my heart is open to possibilities and my head is open to the universe.

  Except now, I can’t stop thinking about one person.

  A person I’ve never met.

  A person I’ve never even heard of until today.

  And to be quite frank, a person whose name I don’t even know.

  Today my mother told me about a lady who works at a hotel and found a wallet with five thousand dollars in it.

  My mother interviewed her because my mother is a reporter. If the lady had kept the money, no one would have known. But she turned it in. That made it news.

  My mother sat across the table from her, in one of the hotel rooms, and asked her, “So, how does it feel to have done something like this? Not everyone would have turned the money in.”

  My mother said the woman sat there, smiled, and told her, “Oh, it is very exciting. Everyone has come to visit me. You’re here. You came to visit me. The TV people came to visit me, and everyone is asking me questions!” The woman was thrilled at the attention.

  Then the woman said, “You know, I’ve worked for thirty years at this same hotel. Every day, I do my best. I make the beds. I clean. I do extra just so that someone might notice. And every day, I put the little card where people can write their comments in the little placeholder on the stand. And then every day, every day, I wake up in the morning and I run in and I look at the card to see if anyone has written any comments.

  “They never have. Ever. People leave me tips sometimes, but nobody has ever written a comment.”

  And, it makes me realize, standing in front of my keyboards, as I play these low notes—like wolves howling at the moon in the middle of the night—so many people live their lives with such nobility and no one ever notices them. Maids. Janitors. Gardeners. So many people in my city and in other cities around the world, who are good people and you never hear about them.

  I hear my city of San Antonio scream with passion in the night, and it touches me. It is sad. It is sweet. It is related. I am a better person because I can hear it.

  I play each note, and this theme song melts me. The sounds rise and fall with the pulse of my almost weeping city. And this woman’s voice and all voices like hers join together in symphony.

  I play the next note.

  I finish my song. It is awesome.

  And after that, I sit back and I close my eyes, pen in hand, and wait each night, listening for the ghosts in my city who scream out . . . and ask for nothing more than to be noticed . . . even if only once.

  FILIBERTO’S FINAL VISIT

  by FRANCISCO X. STORK

  Sitting on the porch of the Cielo Vista Hospice, watching a freight train roll on and on. It’s so long, people in cars waiting at the intersection are starting to turn off their engines and open windows. One guy is on his third cigarette. Then out of who knows where come the words that Filiberto Mendoza said to me some fifty years ago. “We Mexicans living in the US need to have dignidad.”

  I don’t know why Filiberto’s words come to mind just now. All I can think of is that these days I hear a lot about dying with dignity. I have a feeling the people who say that don’t really know what dignity is. I think maybe all it means to them is that I should be able to go quietly, without too much pain. The more I think about dignidad, the more I know it’s real and the less I know how to define it. One thing for sure is that Filiberto had it.

  I met Filiberto when I was a freshman in high school. My father had died the year before, and after the five thousand dollars in insurance mon
ey ran out, my mother and I moved into the Kennedy Brothers housing projects on the outskirts of El Paso. She went to work cooking breakfast and lunch for the Mt. Carmel Elementary School, and I got a speech scholarship to Jesuit High School.

  I’ll always remember Father Martinez, the priest at Mt. Carmel who helped me get that scholarship. After my father died, I started going to six o’clock Mass every morning. It was comforting to sit there in the dark old church. I felt less lonely. Me and maybe four old ladies showed up regularly. One day Father Martinez asked me to read the Epistles, and he saw that I was a good reader. I became a regular lector at the church, and eventually Father Martinez reached out to the school and helped me get that scholarship. That’s pretty much what happened.

  It was at Jesuit High where Louie Fresquez and I became friends. We were both on the speech team and each secretly wanted what the other had. Louie wanted my ability to speak in front of people and the trophies that came with that, and I wanted just about everything Louie had. He was the only freshman in the history of the school who had made it to the varsity basketball team. The first time I saw him, he had these expensive loafers, the kind with those little pom-poms. And his socks were so thin, they were transparent. I never imagined that we would become friends, me with my Kmart shoes and cheap white cotton socks, but we did.

  Louie was seventeen and one of the few freshmen with a license. His parents bought him a used Mustang in good condition. I think Louie wanted to tell the world that he was not only good-looking and popular, but also on the way to being filthy rich. This is the same guy who knew he’d be a corporate lawyer when he was in kindergarten. The other thing you should know about Louie is that, even without the Mustang, he could, if he chose to, have a date with a different girl every Friday and Saturday night.

  Yeah.

  It was Louie who showed up with Filiberto one Saturday evening. I heard the honk and parted the living room curtain just enough to see a man with a shaved head and a white T-shirt sitting in the passenger seat of the Mustang. The man was in his early twenties and looked as if he had just gotten out of prison. There was something tattooed on the side of his skull, but I was too far away to read the words. The whole thing was enough, though, to give me an unsettled feeling in my gut that the entire evening was ruined, and I was pissed that Louie would throw a wrench in our carefully concocted plans for that Saturday night.