Atlas and Alice, Issue 16
Marina Flores
Three Things She Said in Spanish 1 “¡Cierre la puerta! Cierre la puerta antes de que entren los pollos,” my blind, wheelchair-bound great-grandmother repeated from the kitchen table, a cup of lukewarm coffee snug in her flour-dusted fingers. The thing is, we didn’t own any chickens. Still, I admired how each vowel in the word puerta rolled off her pruned lips. From the living room, I peeked down the narrow hallway and through the screen door and listened for the feathery clucks or broody growls. No chickens. During our annual visit, I watched pixelated cartoons on the only television in my great-grandmother’s two-bedroom home. The television had two-foot antennae protruding from the top that my family called “bunny ears.” Later, my mom told me that, decades ago, when my great-grandmother still picked cotton, and before her eyesight dimmed and the colorful world went dark like where the south Texas sky intersects with the earth, chickens once roamed here and laid eggs. 2 “Mi silla de ruedas está en llamas. Los vagones me rodean,” she said, serious this time, both sparse brows furrowed. In a blurry scene, I imagined the creaky wheelchair up in flames while wagons circled around like hands on a clock. My great-grandmother’s wrinkled fingers clenched the sides of the wheelchair while her mind wandered through the twists and turns of life. Although her frail body existed in the present, her mind lost itself somewhere in the winding memories of the past. I envisioned wooden wagons that inched along on an endless route in her brain’s repressed space. This place transported her like a hidden portal, and in a moment, she’d see her husband and the familiar faces of eight children and feel the cotton field sun on her cheeks. I wondered 85
