I stood barefoot in the living room and watched them arrive in a black van. The car jumped onto the sidewalk, missing the driveway and crashing into the faded Mary statuary that guarded our house. Her head shot into the air like a star, chipped paint tailing it all the way into the dewy branches of the palm tree just in front of the living room window. Fireworks. Water drizzled on the yellowed grass in a small, lazy shower. The palm swayed in the night. I screamed. Mama! Papa! I kept my eyes on the window. The floor tiles became warm. A yellow moat of piss collected around me. I screamed, dragging my feet to my room. I slammed the door, and after a second of silence, I opened it, poking my head through the crack. A yellow ribbon, like a party streamer, flowed from my soaked slippers, twinkling across the room with specks of red and blue, sirens and lights. A voice from a megaphone came into the house: “We’re here to take the boy. Surrender him. He is to go back to his country.”
A crowd of brown faces gathered around the van. They hurled screams in the pre-dawn moon of the Miami night. “Asesinos!” they shouted, firing rocks and glass bottles at the parked van. One man climbed a lighting pole, the blinking red light on his camera beeping, Record, record. Atop a pick-up truck parked at the house next door stood two women with flip-flops in their hands and rollers in their hair. They wagged their footwear in the air and screamed at the same time, leaves falling from their nightgowns in the image of Cuban angels. They cupped their hands in circles to hold and magnify the roar of their Spanish: “Asesinos!” Mothers smacked pots and pans against each other—it was the loudest thunder of 2000. Their hair was thinning into strands of brilliant greys. The event was slowly building; hot, heavy emissions of human exhaust. Mother Mary looked down from her palm tree. Mama! Papa! Across the street from my window was a boy with a bandaged head who watched from behind parted curtain as his brother crossed the street. The boy looked at me. Neither of us stirred in the string of our shared gaze. The whole of Miami seemed to be arriving, gathering between us. The grid plan of the city and its tangle of highways emptied out into this one insignificant block of black street.
The doorknob, a smooth metallic wave, was cold on my hand. I shut the door. The darkness of my room seemed to stretch father than before. I felt for the slippery laminate of the closet door. Behind the smells of sweaty clothes, nets of cotton and nylon, I held myself tight around the knees, bent my head forward as if on a falling aircraft, closing my eyes against the salty sea below. I heard the front door fall to the floor. Rubber steps squeaked on the wet floor of the living room. The door to my room came next. The room filled with the motion of men. They scattered into every crevice like scuttling crustaceans. Old bed springs squeaked under their weight. A hollow gun barrel knocked on the closet door. America was in my room, and I tasted him of seawater.
SUBLIME was designed and edited by Larissa Pham. It has been funded by a Calhoun College Creative and Performing Arts Award. Interior covers: detail of FLOWER WARRIOR.