Jose Diego Medina is the web editor at Epiphany Journal and assistant manager of a non-profit thrift shop. He was a 2018 resident of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

I was sitting in the 4:36 winter light of my apartment’s living room, thinking of nothing in particular, stroking Papi sleepily wincing in my lap, when—suddenly I went plunging back, head-over-heels into the swamp of old shame. Mami was already dead some years and a handful of days and I thought I’d dealt with what needed to be dealt with, becoming this new, supposedly better version of myself. But there I was again, alone and bobbing in the murk.

I put a cold hand on my hot head. An uncontrolled groan startled Papi. I wanted to stand and shout, “Okay! I get it! The past is embarrassing! What else do you want me to do with what can’t be undone?”

Was it really impossible to not forever wish certain things different?

 . . .

I really wasn’t doing too well in those days, when Mami’s summoning text arrived, asking me to come down and drive her to an appointment: that is if I could, if I had the time. I didn’t really know then in any solid way that I wasn’t doing too well, but I did know what Mami meant. So, even though the appearance of yet another demand nearly sent me out of my skin, I bought a bus ticket.

“Do you have to?” Vera asked, stretching herself wearily across my desk after I’d told her that my presence was requested back home. This was the day after Mami’s text.

“Apparently there’s a world out there, outside of Pouting Pink,” I said. Time was the main thing I felt I didn’t have in those days—I think Vera felt the same way, too—while representing America’s third-largest retailer of oversexed teen girl clothing. Pouting Pink was Vera’s and my central client. It controlled the iris of our attention.

Around us sparked the energy of exorbitantly priced heels striking Clever Girl’s tiled floor, delivering friendly reminders of how unacceptable it was for anything to be off in this maze of BoConcept desks. The immaculate floor plan stared out wide-eyed at the inspiring views of downtown, the faint sky barred beyond. I could feel my own chunky slingbacks bludgeoning my heels.

Next to Vera’s arm teetered the annotated stack of drafts soon to form our proposal for Pouting Pink’s turnaround. “And it seems I have to,” I said, flicking the area on the latest draft that waited for our/their statement of intent to neatly summon it all up. “Blood obligations or whatever. But I won’t leave you stranded.”

“Yeah, they all say that.” Vera’s fresh manicure pointed past all the high and tight ponytails at the right angle of glass forming Cynthia’s corner office. “Have you told her yet?”

I could just see a suggestion of her straight-backed and peering into her computer’s blue light. Little nuts and bolts of anticipation tightened inside me.

Doubtfully, I said, “I’m hoping for something human.”

“Interesting. Human...” Vera tapped her chin. “I figured in like, oh, dinosaur times, she was simply chiseled into existence against a very, very hard rock but, sure, if you want, human.”

“Supposedly, we all are. It’s what I’ve heard.”

“There are degrees, though.”

Vera and I had arrived at Clever Girl around the same time, after deciding to do something else with the dashed expectations of post-college years. On her brief time modeling, Vera said there was more power for her behind than in front of the camera. I didn’t understand what she meant by power, but I think I understood better when both of us received a welcomed bump up, becoming respective managers of units in the Visual Strategies department, and some years drifted by and both of us were still at Clever Girl leading by implication much longer than initially anticipated from a stepping stone.

It's amazing how you can just fall into approximating souls, Vera once said in a moody bar with bleary eyes. But look at our bank accounts! I replied while trying to remember where I’d left my purse. It was by degrees that we did things then, because to take in the entire picture of what was going on, well, no one got paid extra to do all that.

“I wish everyone would just relax,” I said to Vera’s scrunched face, rubbing my heel.

But all Mami asked for was an escort to another appointment that would hopefully explain the bruise spreading on her face. She’d mentioned its appearance two weeks ago. I figured it was one of those types of things that cleared themselves up.

Vera sighed. “I wish I knew what it means to even relax. What is living if someone isn't out to get you?”

“Does creation have an HR department? I do have complaints.”

Laughing a little too loudly, April, one desk over, turned her nosey Cocker Spaniel-head in our direction, and we shushed ourselves like conspirators.

. . .

 The next day the sky darkened and I left on a bus much later than intended. Irregardless of my intention to leave according to the time on my ticket, Pouting Pink had clamped on with minor emergency after minor emergency and I couldn’t just say, no, gotta go. Sunk in my seat, shadow-draped lumps slipped past as the bus cork-screwed and settled onto a flat expanse of highway, and I wondered if the few muffled bodies scattered around also hoped for a quick trip to whatever, before then returning to the noise of their real lives. 

Before leaving, Cynthia warned against disappearing for too long and then surprised me when the even little marks forming her eyebrows rose, adding, as she looked over my shoulder: But of course. I understand. It’s family, so, of course. As I opened the door she added, Don’t worry. I’m sure it will be fine.

Too worried? I wondered.

And already an icon flashed on my screen. An email from Vera suggested solutions to some of Elizabeth’s, Pouting Pink’s marketing executive, last-minute changes needing incorporation before tomorrow’s initial approval, with final approval hopefully soon-to-follow. The little reply-all button taunted, pressuring me to respond. I needed to provide definitive reassurance that each mile away only increased my determination. Instead, I put my phone to sleep and closed my eyes. I wouldn’t worry about it just yet.

. . .

The bus stopped and I stepped off with a stiff back. Tia Daisy had agreed to pick me up since Mami hated driving late, and her bulk and strength waited against her car. Her gold tooth twinkling, welcoming me back. 

In the car, Daisy handed me a caramel from the pile she kept in the cupholder. “So, what’s new, baby girl?”

“Ugh,” I said, but I was sort of happy to have a new ear in which to vomit what had been happening: how Pouting Pink had lumbered over to ask us for help, unable to internally control the cyber firestorm whipping around their brand for a not-so-very-sexy problem. With a blazing smile, Elizabeth had explained how it all was a simple misunderstanding gone out-of-hand: the color corrector went too far with the poor model’s skin, and what a shame it had come to this! When their big-money account arrived for Clever Girl’s especially market-tested female touch, Cynthia turned to Vera and me because, of course, “we” clearly must see the “amazing” opportunity at our feet, the chance to bring our “unique” eyes to this wellspring of “creative problem-solving.” She made a gesture that emphasized Vera in all this, her special understanding of the model’s predicament, and said, “Let your entire self be part of the solution. Make it dynamic.”

I plopped the candy in my mouth to melt away the sour taste.

“Huh,” said Daisy. “That sucks.”

Irritation flashed—but, really, how could either Daisy or Mami understand what I was going through over there? What did they really know about my life and options?

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m not there. Let the rats take it over. Anyway. How’s Amy?”

“She’s good, she’s good. She asked me to invite you over on whichever night you can escape. Took a long-ass time to settle into the new place with me picking up extra shifts and Amy switching to night manager, but now we got a nice little nest to show off.”

“Tell her I look forward to it.” I watched Daisy’s head float serenely over the collar of her shirt, flickering under arcs of streetlights. “So. What’s all this?”

“Ah, you know your Mami. A very serious lady needs to always do serious things. She doesn’t want to risk driving back alone in case ‘they do something to her.’ So, bye-bye now, it’s your turn, and good luck.”

“But, like, why a bruise?”

“Why not? But I don’t think it’s anything too big. This stuff likes to get weird the older you get.” She tickled a bundle of flesh dangling between her chin and throat. “It could just be some late thing from that fall she took.”

Fall? I thought, but didn’t say, because this new thing, this sudden thing I didn’t know, well, its newness made me suddenly very sleepy with the implied weight of more unwanted complication. Out the window, more unilluminating blobs passed by and, inevitably, Daisy turned on McAllister and the car entered the old neighborhood. The candy crumbled between my teeth. Mami’s house pulled up next to my window, unlit, looking like a toy left behind.

I crept upstairs, passing her closed door, and flung myself into bed with the relief of having a break between leaving the city and being in her presence again—I didn’t want to be a daughter until the next morning—but was left stranded and tossing on the fresh sheets, overwhelmed with the quiet of being here again. After opening and closing my eyes countless times, I opened them again and was confused by the full morning sun pouring through the windows. Fall? I thought, my phone inches from my nose, buzzing with distant worries.

When I opened my door I found Papi waiting behind it. His wet eyes sparkled and blinked. Taking me in again, his tail brushing the hall carpet, he panted a greeting between spaced-out nubs of teeth. I stroked that impossibly small head attached to that funny balloon body, and we walked down together towards the smell of frying bacon.

“Morning,” I said at the threshold of the kitchen.

“Morning,” Tia Daisy called over from the stove.

“It’s almost afternoon,” said Mami.

Papi disappeared under the table to be at her feet. Her stare rose to meet mine. The bruise was bigger and deeper than I’d imagined, like dyed suede. It spread on the upper quarter of her face, edging her eyebrow, dipping below the slice of cheekbone, and stopping where her nose sloped out. I approached her like a wounded animal. Closer up, the blue held splotches of fuchsia with a raw-looking ring around its misshaped border. I bent to kiss her clear side.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Think about what?” I sat down, blinking across the table. “Um, doesn’t look that bad.”

Mami’s submerged eye hooked into mine. I shifted my gaze a few degrees, unsure where to put it. Aside from the blue, there were other less significant changes. Scanning her different deepening furrows, I wondered on leaving on top the dresser, as a departing gift, the container of extremely expensive moisturizer I applied every night to undo the unwanted side effects of time.

“Does it hurt?”

“Nope, it doesn’t,” interrupted Daisy, setting down plates of burnt strips, scrambled eggs, and reheated tortillas. “And time to eat up, blueberry-face and daughter-of-blueberry face.” Mami glared and Daisy pulled back her upper lip, flashing her tooth.

Mami turned back to me. “How’s New York?”

“New York is New York. Tia mentioned you got time off of work? That was nice of them, huh?”

“They owed me the time anyways.”

“She also said something about a fall?”

“She likes mentioning things, doesn’t she?”

Daisy wiggled her eyebrows and twisted her face innocently.

“Why’d you fall?”

“Why do people fall, Maite? Because they fall. It happens. This isn’t because of that.”

“Well, they haven’t said that,” said Daisy. “They said, ‘be careful’ and ‘get some rest’ and ‘let’s take a look,’ and practically begged her to take time off. Even threatened to have her deported if she didn’t.”

“They—and please don’t exaggerate.”

“Work’s been crazy for me, too,” I said. “That’s why I came down later. With this new client, everything is ah-ah-ah.”

“You think it’s too much?” Mami asked. I resented her question even if it hit the right button.

“What isn’t too much?” Daisy said. “I’m too much, you’re too much, she’s too much. Everyone’s too much! Too much, too much, too much!” She belly-laughed her last too much with a force that sent a piece of sweaty egg flying. It glistened on the tablecloth.

“Why are you so loud?”

Daisy cracked into a piece of bacon.

“The plan is still for me to take you to your appointment, right?” I asked.

“If you can.”

Already tingling with the need to slide back into bed, I asked if anyone wanted more coffee and, at the counter, as I poured, I heard Mami over my shoulder comment, “You look good by the way. You look like you’ve been taking care of yourself.”

“Thank you,” I said to the coffee. “I try.”

. . . 

I don’t know when exactly Mami had resolved to be someone who could cut out what she wanted, or didn’t want. But I know that around her sister’s first exhilarated swings in American sapphic freedom there settled an especially jail-like ignorance. You could win wars with her stubborn determination not to see Daisy’s slicked-back hair, the rolled-up sleeves of her men’s button-downs, the love-eyed girls always around. And Daisy, despite her hefty presence, seemed okay with being half-seen, left to do whatever she did over there, until Amy stayed longer than the rest and the domesticating love she brought along asserted an unavoidable fullness.

“What are you so fucking worried about? You don’t have to watch me eat her pussy!” Daisy finally exploded when she tried once more to fill the gap and Mami again recoiled. They didn’t speak for a year, during which I’m sure Mami was lonely because our own phone calls became alarmingly regular. Then, thankfully tapping into that reserve of patience she used as a home nurse for the dying, Daisy reinitiated contact, helping them return to what they’d been, more or less.

Ten Ways to Achieve Optimization declared a breathless headline as I scrolled with a fifth cup of coffee. But these ideals of work-life balance never made explicit where exactly one began and one ended. And I’d managed on my own to organize myself enough so that things like the past and the present remained right where I wanted them, none bumping and bleeding into the other in any way that threatened to drag me from the thinnest layer of the future. My heart raced. Then, as large and small screens failed to distract to the degree needed, another icon dropped into my phone.

An email from Elizabeth, forwarded by Cynthia, declared that, as it was, Vera’s and my planned apology in their voice apologized too much. Cynthia added her frustration and repeated that Pouting Pink needed a quick acknowledgement of whatever and a longer, more positive spin towards a brighter future. There was too little shown of their “new and healing cast of conviction,” too much focus on the unenlightened past.

Seconds later, Vera texted eight crying faces and asked, “What now?”

But this time my ability to even pretend to care slid towards the floor and I left Vera unanswered. Instead, I leashed Papi for a slow walk outside so I could gulp some air.

. . .

Conviction? Conviction! Conviction… I repeated. Thin clouds floated on a tissue paper sky.

“Oh, hi!” Mrs. Robertson popped up from behind a bud-freckled bush. I recoiled, sputtering. A gardening glove to her chest apologized for frightening me and a breeze hit, making me feel under-dressed. I told her how lovely it was to see her again.

“As always, dear. As always. Tell me!” She leaned in like a gal-pal. “Are you still in that big crazy city? Making your darling little dresses?” She gave a quick scan. Despite the dull pleating of her once neatly-pressed face, the edge in her eyes remained, ever eager for the young and information—but age must’ve slowed her ground game. It had been some time since I’d given up balancing my dresses while also pattern-making for second-rate designers after graduating. I explained what I now did at Clever Girl, tying a sparkly bow around it for her.

“And to think—” Mrs. Robertson sighed, and her eyes drifted over me toward the Tolbacks’ front yard, who’d seemed ancient enough fifteen years ago when they’d welcomed us to the neighborhood with a plate of cookies. In glimpses, during sporadic visits home, I noticed different shades of families stepping out from the same mortgaged cocoons that, when we’d moved in, held paler generations. I was on the verge of inquiring about the lovely Tolbacks when Mrs. Robertson sharpened, mentioning my precious Mami and that nasty mark.

“I tell you, I was so worried that day. I was right here taking care of my roses when I saw her fall over. Like a rag doll—flump—like that. She scared me, but she wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. She did look fine, a few marks, and dazed, naturally, but with falls like that one never knows, do they?”

“No, they don’t. But she’s well enough, not complaining.”

“No, I don’t imagine she would. Well—and now she has her wonderful caring girl to help her dear mommy.”

I sensed her eyes shining on me as I looked down at Papi, waiting with floppy ears pulled back, patiently impatient.

“I guess she just needs rest. Like we all do, from time to time,” I said.

Her twittering laugh ebbed into a long breath, during which she slid her gaze back to the Tolbacks’ quiet house. “Tell me about it, dear. Yes. Well. I’m happy to hear she’s doing better.” 

. . . 

I had once been naive enough to try. Most children were, until receiving that final coat of varnish. Before school, as Mami showered, I’d sneak into her room and use her less-than-exciting basics to collage softening and elevating outfits, my attempts to splice the glamor of the pampered women I admired on TV onto the woman who was the center of my actual life. Of course, nothing I ever left laid carefully on her bedspread was ever appropriate—too much for another day as the secretary at a construction company. It was when I threw myself down and cried on top of a perfect combination that she gently pulled my hair and said I should do this for myself.

And a former friend suggested an artist’s market when I complained that I needed to get back to my own work during my final assistant gig; but there twenty-five dresses remained for a week in the rented booth, swaying faintly on their hangers. They’d been good enough for three people but not enough to inspire. Fingering the earthy silks as I repacked them, the impossible lightness like new skins from ancient material demanding delicate care, I wondered why I had even begun this—something about transformation and the possibilities of the body. I’d thought this could’ve done something for me that it ultimately didn’t, and the table with my Singer on it took up so much space.

The same former friend told me about the opening at Pouting Pink as I then nibbled surfaces, waiting for what, I don’t know, probably for someone else to front the costs.

“You do what you need to,” Mami simply said, when I told her I was completely done with the frustrations of dreams. I watched her back as she continued to chop onion and garlic for dinner. I wasn’t sure what else I’d been expecting but we both were well aware of the price of utilities.

See? It was so simple moving on. 

. . .

But in a head-spinning amount of time, Mami’s fall—or whatever it described—had gone from a surprise to something natural to something unnatural. It was only in the petite voice of Mrs. Robertson that the strangeness of the idea really truly hit me. The next morning I woke up to the sun burning on the walls.

. . .

After they called Mami’s name, I remained in the antiseptic waiting room surrounded by coughing. Low muttering and restless legs bounced around. The clock limped along. I wondered about the gaps of time between the fall and the bruise and Mami’s summoning message. Maybe the doctor’s trained hands could better decipher what ticked beneath the bruise.

I received a third text from Vera informing me that the world was a burning hoop through which more fire was thrown, and did I yet have an exact date for my return? Sadface. Drawing up only the blankness that felt truly and uniquely mine, I left her unanswered again, unable to figure out what I owed our happy-hour sisterhood.

The appointment also ended with a shoulder shrug. After a checklist of what Mami’s life had been prior to this, more blood taken to be sifted through, her body bounced from specialist to machine to machine, there was still no clue as to why she leaked where she shouldn’t. The nurse at the front desk summarized what was still up in the air and warned of another appointment after the results.

I drove us back two-and-a-half hours later. Mami sat still, a silhouette against the window’s moving screen. Sunlight did a swan dive through the windshield and rolled around in our laps. There was something exhausted and nervy in the car.

“You missed the turn,” Mami informed, and as I switched lanes to double back, light expanded on the curved glass and, as she raised her hand into the golden diffusion, light easing between fingers, illumination silkening the silhouette, sliding over forehead, jaw, gilding the area just under left ear before gliding off, for a moment completely slipping from the lasso of my resentment, she became her own pulsing thing.

“What about stress?” I wondered, filled with sudden generosity.

Then light cleared to shadow, she lowered her hand, and the unmarked woman vanished. Mami continued staring straight ahead.

“They say stress affects different people, well, I guess…differently. Can show up in weird ways.”

“They.” She turned to look at the dummy sitting next to her. “Life is made out of stress, Maite. If you’re feeling no stress that’s because the dirt is being shoveled over you.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

“How should I know? I’m not one of your they.” She fell back into herself like an anchor.

In the house, metal colors weighed down the sky until sudden fists of rain pounded the roof and windows. Drumming filled the house. Minutes sat like hours. Night dripped. It fell in uneven pieces. I could almost hear the ground sucking up the broken velocity as the bed refused to settle and the pillow refused to inflate around my head. I thought about my upcoming departure; all those unanswered messages that wanted me back, tomorrow even. Cynthia’s most recent steely email suggested that for my own good it would be wise to contact her ASAP. Vera’s longer email explained why she needed to know whether to be angry or worried, besides plain disappointment. What did I need to wait for?

But it wasn’t really waiting because there was no schedule, and behind closed eyes, up in the sky that wasn’t a sky because it was inside of me, more an illegible x-ray, Mami, full and cratered, spread her blue radiation.

. . .

The next night I escaped to Daisy’s. After dinner, the comedy special she’d turned on cackled in the background. The comedian turned his shiny face up into the lights.

“Why is she how she is?” I asked.

“Who like how?”

“Um. Mami. Your sister.”

“Holy Moses—” Daisy lifted herself from the couch she was spread on to look over at me leaning back in her shabby recliner. “You’ve been thinking over there.”

Daisy reached over for her drink, stopped, indicating the bottle, but I waved it away. The rum made a thin sound as she refilled her glass. Amy, left in the kitchen to finish up the dishes after dinner, had held up a soapy hand and asked me not to let her drink too much.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Daisy said. “It's one of those you’re-damned-if-you-do-you’re-damned-if-you-don’t type things. I mean, between you and me, she’s pretty much like our old man. With Maria-Teresa it’s less like people are bugs at her feet, more like padding, but—similar. Too much.” She watched the comedian make the audience ripple then break with a punchline.

I looked over the incline of my legs at the photos, Amy’s and Daisy’s, arranged on the TV console. Next to a photo of them looking browned and satisfied on a beach, I spotted a square holding five sets of eyes squinting in the Salvadoran glare back at me nestled in the soft lamplight, the lilac walls, the pajama-like furniture of Amy and Daisy’s room. In the photo, taken during a visit after she had left, Mami stood between tias Josefina and Daisy, arms set over her chest. Posed shoulder-to-shoulder in front of a razor-wire fence holding back hills bleached by the spark in the sky, all five sisters slightly curled inward. Their faces, as serious as the blood they shared, made me slouch deeper into the recliner.

“But if she doesn’t open that mouth of hers you can’t know what you’re dealing with, can you?” said Amy from the doorway. She smiled and sipped the cup in her hand, radiating that sense of comfort that only the truly comfortable have. What she wanted is what she had.

“Shoot. Nobody needs those A-B-C-1-2-3 type things. That stuff just complicates more than—” Daisy leaned towards me, her face mimicking the photo.

“Look. It’s simple. I’m not saying it’s for everybody but it can be simple because we’re all heading towards the same giant toilet, baby girl. I used to think why me and now, why not me? When I see this client Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she confuses me with her son—who doesn’t even live here—but it’s fine. I used to not like it when they confused me. But, look, now, I don’t mind, just go along with whatever comes out of that fried brain of hers because deep down she knows she’s confused and I know she’s confused and no one needs a reminder AND at the end of each shift she puts two dollars in my hand—her son’s hand, which I shouldn’t take, but it’s a gift, you can’t turn it down, and together those little bills helped to repaint this place.”

The lilac was supple. It nourished the grazing yellow of the table lamp next to me.

“I did a good job choosing, didn’t I?” Amy ignored the miniature amber stream Daisy made as she poured a little more, taking a sip and lingering over whatever was in her cup before looking at me. “Are you okay to drive?”

Daisy slapped her thighs and peered from slitted hoods. “I guess, that’s it for me—the cane’s out!” And her gold tooth shone like a flare.

. . .

Mami was the first to leave, to put as much distance as she could manage between her and Grandpa’s long shadow, and later helping Daisy, Sonia, Josefina, and finally Lisette make their way over, helping them follow the paths she’d laid down ahead of them, but only after each made their own decision to leave—she wasn’t one to convince. Their new lives settled comfortably enough around each other, until, I think it was time, wore away, picking at layers that had scabbed over crusty childhoods. During a gathering with coffee in the kitchen, Daisy was the only one I ever heard openly reminisce with a story of him, “beating all five of us together! At the same time! Like fighting a bunch of screaming ducks! Man, oh, man—” Mami sucked her teeth and told her to shut up. I was scooted out and, later, I guess they saw more glimpses of the separate truths each kept. And when both parents went, one after another, requiring different trips back, those differences raked at the settled, implied understanding, fraying it, until fights saw sisters drifting off in groupings, and at home the phone rang less and less until I knew it was only Daisy on the other end. 

. . .

The next day a headache gathered in Mami. I gave her the last two ibuprofens I’d brought with me and, despite distrust of over-the-counter-medicine, she took them, and gave in to the line of pain she was caught on. Leashing Papi, I thought it would be good, in the hour’s walk to the pharmacy for more, to let that pain have the house all to itself.

We orbited the repaved curves of streets, the different houses; my old middle school made over to look like a totalitarian mall. I noticed the changes; the new lines and shapes, how years mottled to transform the skin of what had seemed so nakedly boring and simple, this space I’d left between Mami and me, that now, as I walked, seemed as big and full and ever-changing as the city had been, once. Above us the tips of trees turned inside out, their bark aluminum in the highlighted afternoon. Papi pulled now and then to inhale whatever had left a dribble before adding his own.

In the pharmacy—after deliberating over which pillbox seemed the most medically sound, and not yet wanting to start back—I lingered in the magazine aisle. Flip-flip-flipping through a copy of Teen Flash with some swollen starlet on the cover, there—on page thirty-two, across from that month’s ten best buys—there she was!

I’d seen the before and after photos during a meeting but the page in the pharmacy was something else. The overheads made amoebas of light on the page’s gloss, on the suspended model—the approximate sienna of her drained to workable clay—and posed akimbo against Pouting Pink's signature color of scar-tissue pink. Long, thin, tapering arms opened a cardigan (that communicated, I don’t know what—tradition?) and revealed, latched onto her perfect model body, the baby-doll sweetness of mediocre intimates.

I wondered what the model thought about what had been done to her and, reaching, I tried to bring back her name, thrown out during a meeting, but I only saw the pantomime of Elizabeth’s red lips moving over bleached teeth. I hadn’t listened, struggling enough to remain upright while waiting for my turn to lead on visualizations of brand stability.

I made a face at those suggestive frilly slip-covers Pouting Pink sold and that many, I guess, wore underneath all our other crap; bows and straps and strips suggested nothing private, barely decorating the expensive paper. And if you removed them to get to the meat of the thing, all you’d find, like trick doors of sexiness, was another pair and another pair and another pair, revealing only whatever combination the content label listed. This is what waits on the other side, I thought.

Then I remembered Papi tied up outside. When I stepped back into the house, I found her moved, now laying on the couch, a loose arm making a pocket for the bruise, the TV humming over Mami asleep, and the box holding us filled slowly with the coming twilight, until all was dark but for fluttering light.

Later, I sent Vera a text.

. . .

An interview with the model had been published while I was away but, luckily for Pouting Pink and me, I guess, nothing about it was very explosive. The interviewer asked the model what she thought. Think about what? Martha Luna replied (apparently with “a long elegant laugh that seemed wise beyond her years”). I appreciate everyone’s concern and I find it nice that people are watching out but, as my mom likes to say, “You drop a little and then you gather it up again and keep on pushing.” It doesn’t take up too much space, honestly. There's so much more and I’m sure it’s, like, ridiculous to say it doesn’t concern me too much, but that isn’t me. And the check isn’t being pulled out of my account. You can’t worry about the little given up when they know nothing about your reserves. You have to gather yourself up and not bother with what isn’t yours to bother with. At least that’s what this business has taught me.”

True. And yet here we were, deciphering those trails of bits and pieces that could maybe be familiar to mine, or mine to hers, but that could also leave you so indisposed to those scattered scraps indicating what else passed through the frenzy, too, transmitting their own wiggling exclamation points and question marks and dot-dot-dots —signals crashing into signals—multiplying clouds of thought-bubbles bursting, gooping up your vision so that other senses needed to be trusted in ways to become real enough, or thin out enough, so that it was possible to pierce material and space and connect to points outside yourself. And yet, in all that, you still missed other pieces floating by your ankles that illustrated other ways. 

On the return bus to the city, after sending a reply-all that said I didn’t think the interview would be a problem for us, I lay in my seat staring out as transitions pressed their flat faces against the window—concentrating on the lingering hum—and when traffic became unbearable, the window turning into a still-life, I knew I was back.

. . .

Papi squeezed out a yawn and shook his head and relaxed it back on my lap with a sigh. I’d taken him when Mami couldn’t do much anymore. I thought of Vera; it had been a month since we’d last gone out.

“POUTING PINK!!!!” I texted her.

“OH. MY. GOD.” Vera texted back.

We clinked glasses an hour later at a bar near my apartment. The white wine was icy going down; the leather and velvet of the barroom folded around us. Votive candles made the thin gold bands clipped at intervals onto Vera’s braids twinkle. I wiggled my toes in my delightfully comfortable shoes as we shared a nice bottle that became two.

“Imagine that we were ever that, huh?” Vera said, twisting a spiral between forefinger and thumb, making two bands dance. “If only we had known.”

I wondered what that meant for her: her own hint of wanting to change the succession that was only how it could’ve been. That impossible feeling of wishing what happened different, to spread apart the little you knew now and brush it over what had been, so it would release its grip; and I wondered if I had ever completely redeemed myself in Vera’s eyes, but here she was, and sitting there gazing at the face of my friend, conveying the past into the pool of this moment, Mami drifted through the background’s huddled light, passing from one set of shadows to another, again taking herself up to her room because I couldn’t carry her weight, but I did leave my door open—just in case, eventually.