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about
Stumble is an independent art and literary magazine devoted entirely to short
fiction and photography. There’s no particular reason, other than we just love
good stories and photography. We publish four times a year (quarterly-ish), and
accept submissions year-round. Please see our website for complete submission
guidelines: www.stumblemag.com. Can’t find Stumble in your favorite
bookstore? You can always find us at magcloud.com.
Issue Number 3, January 2010. Copyright © - Stumble Magazine
No portion of Stumble may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission. Individual copyright of the creative work
within belongs to each author/photographer upon publication.
All questions/comments may be directed to [email protected]
STAFF
Editor & Publisher Nancy Smith
Photography EditorAndrew Monko
Fiction EditorAnthony Russo DesignersSachiko KuwabataNancy Smith
Copy EditorsAndrea Gough Katie Kinney
The Pollution Machine By Jason Jordan
page14
contents
Contributors A little bit about the people who made this
page11
Letter from the Editor Welcometo the issue
page09
throughoutPhotography By Sarah Small
Coffee By René Solivan
page26
Hello.
Welcome to our winter issue.
Here you’ll find an eclectic mix of things. We’ve collected two stories that
live on completely different ends of the literary spectrum, both remarkably
smart and touching, and placed them amidst a handful of beautifully unusual
photographs. The idea of mixing elements that don’t quite fit together seems
to be part of the ever-evolving purpose of this magazine. Sometimes we end
up with a selection of creative work that all seems to flow together, almost
thematic in its cohesion. Sometimes we don’t. In this case, I think it’s the
latter, and we’ve ended up with an especially charming issue. I look forward to
collecting more disparate pieces and giving them a home in these pages. In
the meantime, I hope this issue inspires your curiosity.
Enjoy.
Nancy Smith
Editor & Publisher
welcome
Jason Jordan holds an MFA from Chatham University. His
forthcoming books are Cloud and Other Stories (Six Gallery Press, 2010)
and Powering the Devil’s Circus: Redux (Six Gallery Press, 2010). His
prose has appeared online and in print in over forty literary magazines,
including Hobart, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, Night Train, PANK, Pear
Noir!, and Storyglossia. Additionally, he’s Editor-in-Chief of decomP,
accessible at www.decompmagazine.com. You can visit him at his blog at
poweringthedevilscircus.blogspot.com.
René Solivan’s writing has won the 2009 Northridge Review Fiction
Award, the MetLife National Playwriting Award, and an LTI Mark Taper
Forum Writing Commission. Recent short stories have appeared or are
forthcoming in River Poets Journal, Mosaic, and Northridge Review. In
2008 René received his B.A. in English (Cum Laude) with a focus in creative
writing from CSUN. He has lived in New York, Arizona, California and
recently moved to Nevada where he lives with his partner of 19 years. In
between writing René devotes huge amounts of time trying to decide if he
should buy a dog or just a picture of a dog.
Sarah Small graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.
Now Brooklyn-based, Sarah has turned her childhood hobby of photography
into her life’s passion. Interaction fascinates her, specifically between people,
but also humans and animals. Her varied subjects—from infants to the aged,
from taxidermy to live animals—inhabit surreal scenarios often in absurd
association with one another. Sarah also sings and writes music for Black Sea
Hotel, her Bulgarian a cappella quartet. Since 1997, she has taken a diaristic
Polaroid of herself every day. She plans to pursue this project for life.
contributors
The Pollution Machine must run at all times and I’m the one who runs it.
I’m the one who runs it because I have four arms.
The machine is an internal combustion engine on a waist-
high platform. A tube connects to the exhaust pipe so the pollution
runs up the tube, through the ceiling, and into the air. There are
lots of other people and machines in this warehouse, but I’m the
one most qualified to run The Pollution Machine, except for Lefty,
the only other person on Earth with four arms. He takes over for me
when my twelve-hour shifts end. He prefers his left hands. I prefer
my rights.
While I’m running the machine, one arm constantly feeds it
gasoline. One arm oils it. One arm fixes any problems that arise. And
one arm takes care of my bodily functions and needs. This system
is in place to prevent me from having to leave my station for the
J. JOR
DA
N
15
TH
E P
OLL
UT
ION
MA
CH
INE
16
duration of my shift, which is twelve hours per day, seven days per
week. I live in this warehouse and I’m not permitted to leave.
According to my supervisor, if The Pollution Machine stops,
we will be punished by being killed. On my first day, many years ago,
I asked my supervisor why we had to run the machine.
Population control, he said.
I do not understand, I said.
If the air is polluted, people won’t live as long. There are too
many people on this planet. We’re running out of water, food, and
land. We’ve been ordered to spread pollution in the poorest cities,
in secret. Be glad you live in here and breathe good clean air.
My mother, who I love very much, considered having two of my arms
amputated when I was a newborn. She told me I looked perfectly
normal otherwise. When I was a child yet old enough to fully
understand my condition—that other people had two arms and I had
four—my mother took me to visit a doctor so he could explain it.
You have evolved faster than the rest of us, he told me. We
were in his office. There were stacks of paper on his desk, as well as
a computer and some framed pictures. I couldn’t see the pictures
because they were facing away from me. He took a slab of white
cardboard off his desk and turned it around. It was a drawing of the
evolutionary chart, illustrating the steps it took for man to evolve
from the apes. He continued, I’ve seen your kind before Christopher.
Not your kind exactly but people who have extraordinary abilities the
rest of us don’t. Do you know where Honduras is?
17
No, I said.
It’s far away from here. It’s another country. There I met a
boy who could regulate his body temperature. Do you know what
regulate means?
It means he could make it go up or down, I said. My four
hands were folded in my lap.
That’s right. Very good. No one else in the world can do that.
I told my supervisor: Don’t let anyone touch me because I don’t like
to be touched.
This was when I began running The Pollution Machine. We
were up in the part of the warehouse that overlooks the whole place.
It has a lot of windows and it’s much quieter in there than down on
the floor.
My supervisor picked up the intercom mic and said, This man
is not to be touched. If you touch him you will be shot on site.
Everyone looked up at us.
Thank you, I told him. I stretched out my hand—my top right
one—and shook his right hand. He had glasses, a paunch, and male
pattern baldness, but I liked him anyway.
Do you know where India is, Christopher? the doctor asked. He was
leaning back in his chair, still behind his desk.
No, I said.
It’s another country too, he said, in Asia. There’s a boy—a
teenager—who can run faster than any human alive today.
J. JOR
DA
N
18
Is he as fast as a cheetah? I asked. I was curious, but naturally
uneducated about such matters.
Not quite. A cheetah can run up to seventy-five miles per
hour, while this boy can only run up to thirty-five miles per hour. The
fastest humans can reach near thirty miles per hour, so he’s certainly
advanced. We may be a long way from reaching the speed of the
cheetah, but we’re getting there.
Where’s there?
Why, the next stage of evolution. It’s an exciting time,
Christopher.
The other workers have started throwing things at me—pebbles,
coins, small things the cameras can’t detect. This distracts me from
running The Pollution Machine, but at least they aren’t touching me.
Touching reminds me of the doctor, the experiments, the needles,
the pain.
Under the glass enclosure in the warehouse is a banner that
says, DO NOT UTILIZE TWO PEOPLE WHEN ONE WILL SUFFICE.
The banner is referring to me. There will be consequences for the
warehouse workers if I’m injured and forced to hand over my job to
two people.
I do not want to run The Pollution Machine any longer. I have
decided that I will cut off one of my hands when I’m supposed to be
sleeping. I have not decided which hand I will cut off, but I know I
will not miss it.
TH
E P
OLL
UT
ION
MA
CH
INE
19
Can I go now? I asked the doctor.
Sure Christopher, he said. I don’t mean to keep you. We’ll be
running more tests in the coming weeks, so be sure you listen to your
mother. You can go to her now.
Thank you, I said and walked out his door. I walked down the
hallway and back into the waiting room where I hugged my mother
with all my arms and said, I don’t want these anymore.
J. JOR
DA
N
27
R. S
OLIVA
N
When the sunlight arrived on the island it moved through their
house like ghosts, flooding her mother’s tidy rooms with warm light.
And in that moment the coquíes would stop singing and their house
would come back to life aided by the smell of coffee that rose from
the fields behind their house. Every morning, Lourdes and her family
would sit at the breakfast table and she’d wish she wasn’t eleven but
old enough to drink coffee, this coffee, Puerto Rico’s finest. She and
her sister had tasted it once from a half-filled cup their father had left
behind one morning. They never forgot the taste or how alive and
alert they felt afterwards.
On a windowsill she caught a glimpse of a grey lizard lounging
in the shade, and then vanish so quickly that she wondered if it was even
there. Lourdes ate her breakfast, studying the morning light, the way it
softened the lines around her father’s eyes, the way it lengthened her
28
CO
FFE
E
mother’s shadow as she fussed over her family. The girl loved living on
a coffee plantation, loved helping her father pick beans and the way her
fingers smelled like coffee afterwards. And when her friends came over she
would drag them through the coffee fields and tell them everything she
knew like how the best way to plant the coffee, ensuring the best bean with
the best flavor, was to put seven seeds in a hole at the beginning of the
rainy season—and not a moment sooner—or the beans would not change
colors when roasted, her father would say, and they must change colors so
they can be labeled: light, medium, dark and very dark.
Years later, Lourdes thought of her father’s words as she sat
across from Javier in their modest home in the Riverdale section of the
Bronx. She was staring into her coffee, examining the color, claiming, to
herself, that it was dark, no very dark. Yes, Papi would call this very dark.
They were sitting in the dining room and, like every morning, she sipped
her coffee and wondered how she ended up marrying a Puerto Rican
who didn’t drink coffee.
“How’s your tea?” Lourdes asked without the least bit of interest.
“The movie’s at noon,” Javier said, his head peeking up from
the top of The New York Times. “I’ll meet you in front of the Film Forum
at eleven forty-five. The tea’s fine.”
“I’m meeting Mercedes at three.”
He assured her that she’d be out in time to meet her sister.
Lourdes held her nose over her cup, inhaled then asked, “What movie?”
“Love Story,” he said, setting the paper down on the table.
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“Love Story. Ryan O’Neal, Ali MacGraw.”
Lourdes poured herself another cup of coffee and considered
suggesting another movie, a current movie, anything made in this
29
decade. Javier was a retired history professor who was trapped in the
past, willingly. Current topics didn’t interest him; current films interested
him even less. She opened her mouth, paused, then closed it, regretting
having told him years ago that she hadn’t seen the film, this Love Story.
She had heard it was a sad film, a tearjerker and how she despised that
word; the whole idea of having her tears jerked out of her really pissed
her off and Javier knew this, knew how she avoided these films but he
was determined to see one with her anyhow. After twenty-nine years of
marriage, Javier had never seen Lourdes cry. This bothered him.
And Lourdes cried often but she always made sure to secure an
isolated place, a closet, a pantry, an empty subway car, or her favorite, a
running shower. Only once, when they were first married, did he walk in
on her. She was standing in the shower crying silently when Javier joined
her, aroused. He made love to her and she cried the whole time, hiding
her tears under the spray of warm water. He never noticed.
When Lourdes was twelve her father died of a heart attack in
bed, not his bed, a neighbor’s. A very pretty one. Her mother refused to
cry for her unfaithful husband, demanding the same from her daughters,
their tears met with lashings that lasted into the night. By the time they
sat at their father’s funeral surrounded by teary relatives, Lourdes and
her sister Mercedes remained like their mother: stoic, dry-eyed and
bored as if they were waiting for a bus.
Lourdes reached for a wool scarf, this long ivory thing, its edges
adorned with coffee stains that always reminded her to wash the damn
thing though she never did. Her eyes slid from the movie ad to Javier’s
head, to his bald spot guarded by strands of curly grey hair. Hair she
had come to accept. She missed when it was dark and thick, she often
told him. It was the first thing she noticed, his hair, when she saw him
R. S
OLIVA
N
30
in the main library of Columbia University. She was an undergraduate
student (a senior), he was a professor specializing in Latin History.
And though she’d had crushes on professors in the past this one was
different, he was different. He wasn’t a Smith or a Stein or a Brown,
no, he was a Velez and he was dark and exotic like her. She enrolled in
one of his classes simply to be near him, this man eighteen years her
senior. His Latin History class bored her, but he did not. There was an
intoxicating bravado to his teaching style that she admired, one she
would try to imitate years later in her own classes with little success. She
flirted with him all semester but it wasn’t until she graduated that he
agreed to meet at Mirth, her favorite coffee shop, a hole in the wall on
106th and Broadway filled with creative types smoking, not on a patio
but inside when one could still smoke inside.
“What are you doing this morning?” Lourdes asked.
“Stuff,” he said, finishing his toast.
“Stuff?”
“Yes…stuff.”
From the start, their conversations fell into two categories:
painfully strained or exhilaratingly combative. She couldn’t wait for
him to pick her up for their dates; by the end of each night she wanted
nothing to do with him. She learned to embrace these extremes once
they slept together. She was not surprised that he turned out to be a
passionate lover. After all he was Puerto Rican, it was expected. There
was a rampant, animalistic ferocity in their lovemaking that she had
never experienced. And unlike her younger lovers, students mostly, Dr.
Javier Velez was not into talking after sex or showing affection. He didn’t
even like to cuddle. She liked that.
Javier reached for his pill case and studied the letters:
S M T W T F S.
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FFE
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31
“It’s Thursday,” Lourdes said. When Javier reached for the
wrong compartment, she offered, “The second T.”
Lourdes repeated herself, twice more, until Javier took his pills.
She looked out the window, adjusting her scarf. The wind was blowing
hard keeping yesterday’s snow in motion. Smoke rose from their
neighbor’s chimney, bled into the sky then mocked a cluster of clouds.
Lourdes took a final sip of coffee and looked at Javier who was staring
at the newspaper, intensely, his lips moving, his face contorted as if
preparing for a sneeze that never came. She knew there was no point in
disturbing him now with trivial things like how his newspaper was upside
down. What would be the point? She kissed him goodbye and—for a
brief moment—was annoyed that he never noticed.
At fifty-two she still carried her trim frame with the ease and
quickness of a much younger woman. She moved through Central Park
cautiously, avoiding the small mounds of snow that stood in her path.
She loved this walk. It relieved the tension that was buried in her bones.
Lourdes found her favorite bench and sat down. The snow had claimed
everything. A horse and carriage went by carrying a young man and
woman bundled up in bright colors, tourists no doubt. A bird, a little
fluffy brown thing, landed on the bench and perused her.
“I have nothing for you,” she said.
And as if understanding her, the bird skipped to the edge of
the bench and took off. Her eyes followed its path until the sun blinded
her. Lourdes moved her scarf up over her nose and inhaled, suddenly
comforted by the smell of coffee buried in the stains. Then she studied
the sunlight, the way it drew colors out of everything it touched, the
R. S
OLIVA
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32
same way she studied it as a girl when she lived on the island. She
liked when the light was sharp, brilliant, falling like stardust on the
heads of children climbing mango trees. Sometimes the light was dull
and indifferent, rude even, forcing her to run and hide from it. On rare
occasions the light seemed to be in the most glorious mood, making
everyone it touched look beautiful; love traveled in this light, Lourdes
believed. It lived, slept and wept there. Then by nightfall, she would
forget about the light and become intrigued by the dark that assembled
in the stones and the cracks. This is when she would paint, casting her
memories in watercolors. That was all she ever did as a girl, paint. When
she was ten Lourdes painted a group of children in fanciful colors. It
was her greatest creation, she believed. She gave it to her father as a
birthday gift who promptly hung it over his favorite chair. That night she
passed by her parents’ bedroom. Her father was in bed, reading. Her
mother was standing in front of Lourdes’ painting, brushing her hair.
“I love my Lourdes,” her mother said in Spanish. “But it looks
like she paints with her eyes closed.”
Lourdes never painted again.
“Dr. Lourdes Velez is the best art history professor I’ve ever
had.” Though she had never heard anyone say this, Lourdes convinced
herself that they sat around, her students, and said such things, in
cafeterias or bookstores, skimming through art books, sipping coffee.
This thought tumbled through her head as she drifted through the
halls of the art building at Hunter College, doing her best not to make
eye contact with the students. What made her a successful professor,
she believed, was her unwavering aloofness, a trait she made sure was
CO
FFE
E
33
always on display. Lourdes knew her students feared her, many even
hated her, she was sure of that. She watched them now, these young
men and women passing her by in the hall, some with pierced ears,
others with eccentric looks, their locks dipped in colors lifted out of
crayon boxes, the odd colors, the ones that even she, as a child, didn’t
know what to do with. While some of her colleagues met with students
after classes, at bars and coffee houses to engage in trivial arguments
about Impressionism or their favorite Monet painting, Lourdes avoided
participating in such inappropriate behavior.
“You should make an effort,” Javier said to her once, “to
connect with them.”
“I have office hours,” Lourdes said. “Students can come by
every Tuesday between two and three and discuss whatever they want.”
“Do they?”
“Some do,” she lied.
A colleague passed Lourdes in the hall. They exchanged nods
and she continued drifting, examining, making sense of these young
people rushing by in peculiar clothing that said, Look at me, I’m special.
She understood them. She too, at their age, made herself up as she
went along, out of regrets and resentments and whatever the latest
fashion was. In her senior year, after one more vicious exchange with her
mother, Lourdes decided to rid herself of anything that reminded her
of the old widow. Lourdes took her hair—that was as long and black as
her mother’s—chopped it off and dyed it the color of chicken fat. Her
spiky do looked like the top of a yellow cactus. When her mother saw
her at a family gathering, the small woman sipped her coffee and said,
in broken English, “Now your outside matches the inside.” And even
though Lourdes was not sure what that meant, she despised the tone
R. S
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34
in the woman’s voice. She didn’t call her mother for months. This
went on for years. Mother and daughter rarely exchanged words and
when they did, the words were polite and brief, always brief. She
took days, sometimes weeks, to return messages from her mother.
Lourdes wanted nothing to do with her. She had never forgiven the
old widow for selling the coffee plantation and moving her and her
sister (still in their teens) to Brooklyn. Her mother purchased a brick
house with the smallest yard in the world. When Lourdes saw this
yard for the first time she said nothing. She went to her room, sat in a
closet and cried for a year.
Ten minutes before she was due in class Lourdes stepped into
her tiny office. She went through her mail then tossed it in the trash.
She checked her voicemail but there were no messages, there haven’t
been any in years and she wondered why she even bothered checking
anymore. Everything was done via email now and this distressed her,
never hearing a voice on a message, even a short one like Call me, we
need to talk. But no one needed to talk anymore and this made her
sad now; she tried to push the feeling away but it kept jabbing at her
from all sides. Finally, she surrendered. Lourdes closed her office door
and sat there, crying, scanning her emails, writing the same response
to each one: Call me.
Lourdes wiped her eyes and opened her office door. She began
to color her cheeks with peach blush, lots of it. It was the only color
able to offset the cruel green tones cast by the fluorescent lights that
followed her around all day. Her colleagues were walking by her door,
paired off in twos and threes discussing evening plans. Lourdes was
CO
FFE
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35
never included. When she was asked once at a department gathering
what her biggest regret was, she lied and said, “Not having children.”
It seemed like the best answer to give, the one she felt would gain
her the most sympathy. Her biggest regret, however, was her inability
to make friends, to show interest in others, to carry a conversation,
things that contributed to her realization that she had not been able
to avoid becoming her mother, a woman who often spent her time
in a dark house, alone, while her daughters sat outside watching the
neighborhood women carrying on, smoking, laughing, often dancing
with each other in their summer dresses.
“Don’t you have a class now?” a female colleague asked, her
head suspended in the doorway.
Lourdes nodded, pleased that someone had actually spoken
to her. She opened her mouth to engage the woman but she had
already vanished.
She kept her pacing to a minimum during her lecture, making
sure she never wandered too far from the podium. Her notes—on blue
index cards—were stacked neatly in front of her. Though Lourdes had
not read from an index card or even glanced at one in over ten years
she felt comforted that they were there, these cards, convinced she’d be
lost without them.
“Charles Baudelaire, a French art critic, once wrote,” Lourdes
said from the podium, “‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in
choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling…’”
Her monotone voice continued and she heard it but didn’t
recognize it, feeling as if it were coming from a less interesting professor
R. S
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36
standing behind her. Her eyes wandered the room making sure never
to rest too long on any particular student, especially the ones hiding
behind laptops. Lately, it was a challenge for Lourdes to ignore the
persistent sound of fingers slamming against keypads. But it wasn’t
the tapping that distracted her but the idea that her students were
not taking notes but updating their Facebook page or searching
Craigslist for a free futon or typing over and over I’m so fucking bored!
Who could blame them, she thought. Even she was bored with her
own lecture, with the whole idea of Romanticism, a movement that
emphasized in its time—for the first time—strong emotions as part
of the aesthetic experience and what a ridiculous idea that was, she
had written, years ago, on one of her index cards. Suddenly, Lourdes
began to rush through her lecture, anxious for it to end. Her slide show
of art from the Romantic period—Fuseli and Delacroix mostly—was
now at the mercy of her twitching finger, flashing rapidly on the screen,
making her feel as if she were on drugs, as if she were drowning in the
very artwork she was talking about.
Lourdes ended the slide show abruptly and turned on the
lights. There was a silence in the classroom as everyone waited for
their eyes to adjust to the light. The students studied Lourdes and she
knew they were trying to determine if her lecture was indeed over.
They were waiting for her usual cue and, after a few seconds, she gave
it to them. Lourdes raised her left eyebrow, a gesture that affected
the room like a magic wand, prompting her students to come back
to life with a feistiness that only surfaced during the Q&A portion of
the class. They were disputing her lecture now with questions that
challenged her claims about Romanticism. Dr. Lourdes Velez defended
herself with arguments she had memorized in grad school, quoting
CO
FFE
E
37
facts and figures, citing sources, her voice soft and toneless as if she
were reading a camera manual. At the end of the class there was
still no consensus in the room but Lourdes did not care. She left the
classroom with a small smile hidden under her scarf, content that
her students had done exactly what she had wanted, engaged in the
obliteration of Romanticism.
Lourdes arrived at the Film Forum with her mind drained,
her body exhausted, ready more for a nap than a movie. She found
someone there that resembled Javier, a younger Javier, staring at a
movie poster, rocking back and forth like a child waiting for his mother.
He looked almost like he did when she first met him, his hair dark
without a trace of gray, still messy but in a cool way. His black coat was
open, revealing a cranberry sweater she had never seen; it hung loosely
disguising his large belly.
“You like?” Javier said.
“What did you do?” Lourdes said, kissing him.
“I got here early and was walking by this hair place on Waverly
and thought, ‘Why not? It’ll kill some time.’ Then I went shopping. Is this
color too much?”
Lourdes smiled and shook her head. Javier took her hand and
she didn’t feel like she had in the last few years, like she was out with an
uncle she was fond of. She didn’t pretend to cough in order to pull her
hand away from his grip either. When Lourdes is asked, years later, if she
was surprised that Javier had taken his own life, she will say yes, yes she
was surprised and then she will talk about this moment and his hair and
the cranberry sweater. She will remember the rest of their date going
R. S
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38
by quickly, each moment overlapping with the next one, flashing by like
the movie trailers that played that night. Some details will be vague for
Lourdes, others will be very clear like the moment when the Love Story
theme filled the theatre and the audience broke into applause. Or how
the air smelled like butter and nachos.
Lourdes stared at Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal rolling around
in bed. She wondered when was the last time she and Javier had made
love. Five years, six, probably longer but it wasn’t her fault.
“It’s the pills,” she had told Mercedes once. “The ones that
lower his blood pressure, that keep his anxiety in check, that help his
liver function. They’re to blame, not me, it’s them that make it difficult
for him to stay excited and alert and…you know, I used to try everything
to keep him aroused. Then I tried nothing.”
Ali MacGraw was dying on screen. From a hospital bed she
asked Ryan O’Neal to hold her. He climbed onto her, fully clothed, and
held her. Javier wiped his eyes and grabbed Lourdes’ hand in the dark.
As soon as she felt the tears on his fingers, warm and wet, Lourdes
pretended to cough and pulled her hand away.
The cab stopped in front of the Whitney Museum and Lourdes
saw Mercedes on the corner with her hands all over the place, her
mouth moving rapidly looking as if she were talking to herself instead
of the Bluetooth device in her ear. Then Javier said something about a
grocery store, how he was going to stop at one and pick up a few things
and did she need anything.
“Coffee,” she said, unlocking the cab door.
Javier began to mumble, quietly at first, making no sense
CO
FFE
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39
R. S
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as if his sentences had shattered in his head, like glass, and then
reassembled themselves in random order. The cab driver’s eyes met
hers in the rearview mirror. Lourdes looked away. Javier’s mumbling
grew louder. She pulled him close and kissed him on the lips, hard, the
way she used to kiss him a million years ago after he had been away,
for days, on a conference or something. It lasted some time, this kiss,
and when it was over Lourdes looked at Javier. “And maybe if I had
known,” Lourdes will say tomorrow to Mercedes, “that I wasn’t going
to see him again, I would’ve said something important, you know, like
how I still loved him.”
Instead, Lourdes picked up her bag and stepped out of the cab,
never looking back.
It was after eleven when she arrived home wet and exhausted
and wishing she had gone home with Mercedes. Like every night Javier
had left all the lights on in the house; it helped him fall asleep, it made
him feel like there were people in all the rooms. Lourdes turned up
the heat then began her nightly ritual, drifting from room to room,
turning lights off. She reached their office and paused. The room had
been transformed into a classroom. The blackboard that had sat in
the basement for years was now attached to a wall with large nails that
further splintered the old wood frame. There was a message on the
board written in blue chalk with flawless penmanship: The Napoleonic
Rule of Spain and Its Consequences. In the middle of the room sat three
school desks. She moved by them slowly, noticing the same worn book
resting on every desktop, each one opened to the same page, one
dominated by Francisco de Goya’s painting, The Second of May 1808.
She remembered the painting, seeing it for the first time in Dr. Javier
Velez’s history class.
Lourdes turned off the light and went to their bedroom.
She was explaining to the police now that she had been out
with her sister all afternoon then they went to see a play and she
couldn’t remember the name of it but the program was in her purse.
Lourdes began to feel herself becoming annoyed at these strangers in
blue moving about her bedroom, questioning, inspecting, searching
for god knows what while Javier’s body hovered over a mountain
of coffee beans. His body hung there like a giant marionette some
puppeteer had tossed aside. Lourdes looked at her Javier, at his body
swaying, shaking her head, casually, as if he were trying on a shirt
she did not approve of. Cut him down already, she kept thinking, her
impatience growing the way it did when she waited too long at the
bank to make a deposit.
Later, when the police and ambulance had driven away taking
Javier with them, Lourdes sat in their bedroom, alone, wishing a
neighbor, any neighbor, had come over and kept her company. Instead,
she was consoled by a mountain of coffee beans. She opened her cell
and called her sister, then her mother. She sat on the bed, listening to
the raindrops tapping on the windows as if they were begging to be let
in. She looked at Javier’s rope curled up in a corner. It reminded her of
an old mop head like the kind her mother used to use. Lourdes moved
and knelt in front of the coffee beans. Her hand reached into the pile
and grabbed a few beans and she shook them in her hand like dice.
Lourdes dragged the old school desks and blackboard onto
40
CO
FFE
E
the sidewalk. She stood in the slush, allowing the rain to drench her.
She wondered if Javier could see her now, see her face and tell the
difference between the raindrops and her tears. Then she went inside
and stood in the bedroom, lost, as if she was in someone else’s house.
The candle she had lit earlier in their bedroom was still burning. She
moved the Windsor chair to the window, sat down and waited for her
mother and sister to arrive. She looked at the coffee beans shimmering
in the candlelight, their shadows shifting with the flame as if they were
breathing. Lourdes closed her eyes and inhaled until she could see it
all, clearly, her room as a little girl, the coffee field behind their house,
her father walking through it in the moonlight, the glow of his burning
cigarette following him like a firefly. Then she felt comforted when she
heard them, in the distance, the songs of the coquíes, echoing through
her mother’s tidy rooms. 41
R. S
OLIVA
N