#ive gone the tea route as he often has to ask other family members to make him tea when hes working from home and is stuck in meetings

[andromedasummer]

picking out tea for my dads late fathers day gift (family were looking after me over it so its a ty gift too) and my god us having a similar taste in tea doesnt change how hard this is

[alexsanchezbressler-blog]

Reports from South Texas, 1995-1999 (fiction)

1. Facing east toward her door of peeled white paint, Gladys genuflects the air an arm’s length in front of her with an eight-inch kitchen knife. She is cutting clouds.

It’ll be fat rain today, she mouths.

She wears a simple night gown, purple silk with a pink hibiscus print. The slippers on her feet used to be white. Her hair used to be black. Her face is long from wearing heavy skin, and the ridge of her brow casts a soft shadow over sunken eyes and gated eyelids. When she hears the gentle topple of a plastic cup coming from the back of her home, her right ear flicks back half a centimeter, and she knows in her bones that someone has broken into her house. She waits on the living room couch in silence, a broom to her left, the eight-inch knife to her right. Her body sits mute, save for the lonely scuffle of slippers on wood.   “I know that you’re back there. Come out now.” The hollow cluck of the fallen cup remains the only sound from the back of the house. Gladys pictures it now: a stranger, forty, one scar on the peak of his right eyebrow. No gun, only rings. He wears work boots and there’s paint on the jeans his father used to own. He will push her around if he must. But this is not the figure that walks into Gladys’ living room, silent and barefoot on the linoleum floor. This is Eric, only a boy. He has chocolate on his face and will now be led back home to his mother. ¡Víborito! — 2. Ray Gomez would like a loan on his homework. He’ll study later, with interest. — 3. Cardenas’ Grocer on the corner of Culebra and Bandera. That’s where Maria has been sent to pick up novelty shirts for her father’s side of the family. “Maria, why don’t you get them something to remember this place by, huh? Something original”—Maria’s mother, Patty, says that last word in Spanish, filling it with air rather than the hard clunk of a “g.” It is the first time Maria has heard her mother speak Spanish in months. “Get them the shirt with the lime-green print and the black background. I used to wear those suckers for days.” In the corner of the house, Maria’s niece Carmen is picking up small porcelain rabbits and placing them on the floor. Everyone lets Carmen do her own thing—she has a bit of a speech impediment, and she often has trouble communicating what she needs to say. It’s easier, what with both sides of the family converging in the two-room family home, to leave Carmen be with her bunnies. “Yea. They were loco for me at Cardenas’,” and Maria bites her lip one sinew too hard trying not to pity her mother. The walk to Cardenas’ is hot, so Maria makes a game of trying to read billboards through the heat waves rising from the pavement. She crouches on her knees to get the right angle. Bill Miller Barbeque. Maybe she’ll buy a wet brownie and some sweaty tea. Mario’s Bakery. Or perhaps she’ll snag an empanada. She knows the town well enough, but it’s been a while since she’d walked around the West Side. The whole family is in town for her grandmother’s funeral—including her father’s very Jewish relatives. They are fine people. They will go to the Riverwalk and sit with the other tourists, each holding a menu larger than a map of the United States. They’ll see the Alamo. They’ll learn that the Alamo didn’t always have the signature façade you see on stamps and brochures, that it was only added when someone figured out how to make money from all the death that happened there. They’ll see the Tower of the Americas after the wake for Maria’s grandmother. All the while Maria will explain to them why, yes, she is aware that the job market for English majors is rough in this economy, that, yes, she has heard about Teach for America. Maria buys three T-shirts of thin cotton. She thinks about how she has grown up half-Jewish, herself. She knows the prayers: Barukh ata Adonai…and so on. Every holiday season was spent with a multi-colored Christmas tree in the corner and a menorah by the window. Maria enjoys spending time with the Jewish side of her family, in their element of the D.C. suburbs. But as she makes her way back from Cardenas’, Maria peers at a Fallas Paredes discount clothing store and St. Jude’s Cathedral. This is not Bethesda.

When Maria arrives back at the house, the whole family is lined up ready to take a photo. “Ay Maria! We didn’t forget you. We were just setting up, that’s all.” The family glistens like fish in a barrel.   Maria walks over to stand by her sister. She leans over and whispers through a couple inches of black curl: well at least Mom’s having a good time. Maria’s sister nudges her with her hip, all while holding Carmen who has been saying jeez jeez jeez on repeat for the past five minutes. “It’s cheese, honey. Chuh. Chuh.” “So, Patty, tell me. What was it like growing up here?” This from Daphne, who wears a new hat with an embroidered logo of the Texas state flag and a slogan that reads, Everything’s Bigger in Texas. “It was fine. I used to have these little dolls, like these knock-off American Girls. I’d go out back and play nurse with them, and I’d get these huge roofing nails, maybe three inches long. They were left over from when my Dad first built this place. Anyway, I’d have these dolls, and I’d say, ‘Allllllll better,’ and I’d stick ‘em in the arm with one of those nails, just like a Tetanus shot. Ha! We made our own fun.” “That must have been so hard, Patty.” “What?”

Maria makes time to see the backyard. When she was alive, Maria’s grandmother was a meticulous gardener, and she’d curated a gallery of bluebonnets and sunflowers, tomatoes and pears. These days it is wilderness. Maria has to keep her feet moving, rather than risk having fire ants coat her calf. The blue metal swing-set that Maria and her mother both grew up on is now rusted and hidden beneath a sheath of vines and leaf litter. A mop lays strewn in the middle of the cacophony, and when Maria picks it up, it remains stiff in the same flayed position it had on the ground, frozen in time and stale microfiber.   From the corner of the yard a rooster emerges, reminiscent of a velociraptor amidst all the weeds. Maria remembers stories about her grandmother and the neighbors. Like that one time when her grandmother saved a kid from the fighting cocks next door. They say he was bleeding and on the ground, a massive beak tearing at his arms, blood and feathers springing forth like dust from that dirty kid in the Charlie Brown series. They say Maria’s grandmother leapt over the fence and ripped the boy from the cage, that she stared down the cock, and with an air of finality she glared at the animal: No. Me. Toques. Maybe this rooster is the progeny of those original fighters. Maybe this one is related to the brute that almost took out that kid. Maybe not. Maria stares at the animal for a moment, and with a swift yank of the arm, she whips herself into a straight posture, and salutes. “No me toques, little chicken!”

Back inside the house, Maria could have sliced the air with a kitchen knife. All her tíos have congregated in the back room, flipping through old family photos. Patty and Carmen, who still holds a porcelain bunny, remain with three or four members of family-cum-tourists, as Maria’s father has gone out to buy ice. “Jeewwws. Jeewwwss.” Maria bites her tongue, stifling a laugh. Patty stops explaining what a telenovela is midsentence. She whips around to see Carmen standing with a small pout on her lower lip, as she repeats her soft incantation: “Jewwwsss. Jeewws!” “Carmen! Stop that right now. Right. Now.” Conversation resumes. Maria sits down by the window unit and listens in. “So when did you first learn English?” Daphne digs her toes into the foam of her flip flops as she waits for a response. Patty takes a sip of Snapple iced tea. “Well I grew up with it.” “Yes, but how is what I’m asking.” “Jeewwwss. Jeeeewwwwws!” “Uh. I don’t know, I just kind of talked to people?” “They didn’t have ESL at your school?” “I didn’t need ESL.” “Mama, Jews. Please, Jews.” “That must have been so hard, Patty.” “What was so hard! I spoke English!” “JEWS!” Everyone looks at Carmen then, as she stomps on the ground in her bare feet. Patty is on the verge of giving her some Benadryl to fall asleep quick. Daphne cocks an eyebrow, wondering what kind of education this kid is getting. Maria sits near the cool air, watching as a tear falls down Carmen’s face. And Maria says, “Honey, do you want your chanclas?” Carmen melts in relief. And Patty translates: “Oh. SHOES!”

— 4. Gary lives on Calle Valencia. It is a short strip lined with squat houses and metal fences that, when shaken, sound like tin jingle bells. On this street people drive at a slow crawl, rolling the pace at which a cigarette eats itself. The stray dogs demand such attentiveness. And yet, there are those who insist on driving in haste down Valencia, causing mothers to grip and pull their children toward their hip. Once, Gary was out by the chain-link, looking to grab the mail. He wore a green bathrobe with purple socks on the street textured like a concrete Pollock. He left small bits of cotton fray in his wake: breadcrumbs on a familiar route. As Gary grabbed the mail, a tan Chevy and a faded red pickup the shade of a rooster’s beak drove past—hood to hood—as one driver zoomed backwards and the other nudged him along. From above, you’d see something vaguely homoerotic about the whole scene: two front license plates, kissing, unabashed and speeding forty down Valencia, all while the cotton puff of Gary’s hair swiveled and judged as he gripped the daily mail. Today, a dog leaps onto a fence, shattering the chain-link with a moan.   — 5. They say la matanza, the slaughterhouse, steals the sense of smell. But it didn’t take one cent more than that from Ramón.

Ramón lies on a twin bed, ninety-six and sporting a full head of gray hair. His room is an anachronism: a vintage spring bed framed by a chrome IV drip, chipped paint lit up by the small green and red blips from his family’s phone chargers. Even his breathing, which is thickened by a swollen tongue, sounds ancient against the sharp tin beep, beep, beep of his heart monitor. “A Sunkist, please. Will someone please get me a Sunkist.” Ramón is old enough now that his words begin to lose their definition when he speaks—will hun-wun get me uh zun-kids—blending together like the last ninety-five years of his life. His grandson, Danny, flits into the room like a squirrel, holding a small orange soda in a glass bottle. Danny places the Sunkist on Ramón’s dresser next to a full cup of cold coffee without making eye contact. At the last moment, Danny turns, catching the yellowed porcelain of Ramón’s sclera, and he runs out the room with only a few slips from his slick crew socks. Ramón settles into his bed, keen to the clips of sound that flood his last room.

“You should spend more time with your grandfather, Danny.” “Ok, Mom. Okay—he scares me, though.” “He’s just old, he won’t bite. I promise. Listen. When he had his stint in the Navy, he was a chef. When he came back home, he kept cooking for the whole family, he was so used to it by then. We’d all be sitting in the living room and he’d walk in—you know how lanky he is, he’s a tall guy—with a tray of twenty biscuits. And he’d also make this toast with meat and gravy on it. Called it SOS. You know what SOS stands for?” “Save Our Ship, right?” “Nope. Shit On a Shingle. Or so he tells us.”

Ramón never quite falls asleep. He is thinking. He thinks about the last time he saw his friends, and how they remain so perfect in his memory (Billy’s curl of hair falling on his left eyebrow, Miguel’s beer belly growing rounder by the year). He remembers the white plaster of their work uniforms, the puff of double-sweaters layered underneath. The clear plastic masks that covered their faces from the splay of cattle blood. The cattle blood. The relentless pff, pff, pff of air bullets, stunning the animals into unconscious spastic kicks. The large drains that pocked the floor of la matanza. He remembers the knuckle punches they gave each other at the end of the day, small tokens of intimacy sterilized by the thick of industrial rubber gloves.

“I know that you are hiding there.” Danny freezes up on the other side of the wall of Ramón’s bedroom—how did he know I was hiding here? Ramón licks his cracked lips, waiting to see if his grandson will come in the room. He does not. I hid once, thinks Ramón. Yes, I hid from her. Ramón glances at the bed across the room, empty now for three years. He shuts his eyes, searching for the truth of their first encounter… …Break time, twilight, la matanza. They are standing under the orange halogen that isolates the break porch from the dark night. Miguel slips a flask from the pocket of his innermost sweater and shakes it in front of Ramón’s face with a cheeky grin and wide eyes. Ten minutes chatting pass. From the edge of the clearing, beneath a flurry of pecan trees, Ramón is the first to spot her. A woman. Ramón taps Miguel’s arm with the back of his hand, gesturing toward her with the flask. The woman begins to walk toward the porch, hips swaying, eyes locked in as if they were tied with taut fishing line to the boys on break. When Ramón squints, he swears that she is looking straight at him, but with his eyes unadjusted to the night he cannot tell for sure. The woman’s legs begin to shuffle, closer, closer to one another. She does not fall to her knees: she melts. Her arms collapse to her side—what in hell, mutters Miguel, who begins to trip back toward la matanza—and the woman’s skin takes on a scaly gleam. Her body attenuates, and she slithers, the diamond of her head and the ruby of her eyes still locked on Ramón; she is staring at Ramón. Una víbora, por Díos. Miguel is gone. Ramón is stock-still, frozen in the white plastic muffle of his sterile uniform. That is, until the woman sticks out a forked tongue, long and body-pink, sharp. She becomes an eight-foot green viper. Ramón runs and hides inside the chrome warehouse of la matanza.

But this is only his memory now. In walks Danny with a tray of street tacos bordered by three quartered limes. Ramón remembers a time when he could smell food in the house. He remembers when all he could smell was the scent of cattle hide. He remembers when he could only feel the pull of air on the walls of his nose. But the tacos taste fine enough.

“Danny, do you know how your grandpa and grandma met?” “No, Mom, I don’t.” “Well, my Mom loved to tell this story, so here it is. Apparently, she was watering flowers out by her front yard, over at her old home near the slaughterhouse. You remember I showed it to you? She’s minding her own business and up comes your grandfather. He stands by her flowers, staring real close at this butterfly—a monarch, I think. “Naturally, Mom asks, ‘Can I help you?’ “And your grandfather, so smooth, keeps looking at the butterfly. He says, ‘I bet these butterflies traveled thousands of miles, just to smell your flowers.’ And Mom tells him, actually, they’re drinking the nectar. That they’re hungry, so they have these long tongues that unfurl to drink up the flower. And Dad looks at her right in the eye, and they fall in love right there.” “Seems a little weird to me.” “Yea, well, it was the ‘50s.”

The clicks and beeps of Ramón’s machines become frantic. Ramón is silent, but his eyes remain wide as he stares at the spin of his faded white fan. Danny and his mother are by his side. Tears, tears, prayers, and candles. The callouses of Ramón’s hands are rough on Danny’s palm. The whirs of machine begin to fade. His last breath in: a hard rush of air through the nose. His last breath out: a small mutter, a prayer, and a greeting. Mi víbora, mi víbora, mi amor. —