Stumble - Issue 3 by Nancy Smith

Stumble fiction & photography

WHAT IS THIS?

about STAFF Editor & Publisher Nancy Smith

Photography Editor Andrew Monko

Fiction Editor Anthony Russo

Designers Sachiko Kuwabata Nancy Smith

Copy Editors Andrea Gough Katie Kinney 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.

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 info@stumblemag.com

WHAT PAGE?

contents page09

Letter from the Editor Welcome to the issue

page11

Contributors A little bit about the people who made this

page14

The Pollution Machine By Jason Jordan

page26

Coffee By RenĂŠ Solivan

throughout Photography By Sarah Small

HELLO

welcome 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

WHO ARE WE?

contributors 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.

The Pollution Machine By Jason Jordan

15 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

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The Pollution Machine must run at all times and I’m the one who runs it.

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.

THE POLLUTION MACHINE

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?

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

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.

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the floor.

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 POLLUTION MACHINE

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.

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.

19 J. JORDAN

Coffee By René Solivan

27 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

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When the sunlight arrived on the island it moved through their

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.

COFFEE

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

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

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

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her tears under the spray of warm water. He never noticed.

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.

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“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.

“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.

31 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

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At fifty-two she still carried her trim frame with the ease and

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

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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

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?”

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

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“Some do,” she lied.

in the womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice. She didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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

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her tiny office. She went through her mail then tossed it in the trash. She checked her voicemail but there were no messages, there havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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

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

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

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already vanished.

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

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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

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

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

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open, revealing a cranberry sweater she had never seen; it hung loosely

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.”

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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

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.

39 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.

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It was after eleven when she arrived home wet and exhausted

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

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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

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. SOLIVAN