The Mare

Silvia

I felt it coming on at work, sharpness in my stomach, light head, hard to stand. Juanita next to me said somebody’d been in the bathroom already, sick from the food truck salad, did I have it? I did, but my body is good; if I tell it to hold on, it does. Still, it made me dizzy to keep moving my hands in the same stupid puzzle, the same sounds I hear every day driving me like a pain motor. I broke into a sweat and this woman Lena told about how she used to work for, basically, an ass doctor and she was sometimes in the room when people, white people, were examined. The look on they faces, when they realize what’s going to take place, that they are going to be on their knees with their face and pants down, getting they ass thoroughly finger-fucked in front of a black woman! Everybody laughed, and for a second the motor was beautiful motion, like we were all walking inside a conch shell spinning like a wheel, our feet in exact grooves like gold threads. And he had arms like a white gorilla, and I think he lo-o-ved his job, because he went at it! We laughed, and she said it again: The look on they faces! And my sweat passed. I came back to the line, hot then cold, my fingers moving without my telling them.

I got home to fix food. I had crackers and ginger tea instead of dinner and for once Velvet didn’t act like a malcriada, just sat and read her book in a corner. I lay in bed coming in and out of sleep while street noise patterned up and broke. Cars, voices, music, lights, subways rumbling in their dirty holes. Except that sometimes there was a forgotten passage and a crack to hide in, or a flight of stairs, and I ran down, and there was a young blanca running too. She was looking for something and she was in danger and she did not know it. Street noise filled my ears; good voices forced into vicious shapes by iron hands, whose hands? Dante came into bed with me and I held him tight. Where was my daughter? God, with the white girl! And the white girl walked in a hall with living heads sprouting from walls and they spoke all languages but not one could understand the other and their talk split our ears. I screamed, Shut up! And woke with truck poison coming up my throat.