Excerpt from a rained out NYC reading...
...and a tease for something rad happening next week.
Hi everyone. Chuy here coming at you from a hotel in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Today’s post will be an update before getting back into the swing of things next week. I’m trying to keep a general schedule of dropping a post every Friday morning. I wanted to maintain said schedule while in NYC for the Poets & Writers WEX award week but I seriously underestimated how exhausted I would be after going on about the town. This trip has definitely filled my cup and it’s been great to meet so many wonderful authors, editors, agents, and others in the literary community here. It has given me a good resolve to get cracking on my writing future.
There was one major bummer though. The culmination of the week was set for Friday. Where the winner of the poetry prize, David Ehmcke, and myself were scheduled to do a reading at the fabulous P&T Knitwear bookstore. A morning weather alert on my phone foreshadowed a different outcome for the evening.
It just so happens that NYC is experiencing record breaking flooding. This resulted in P&T closing for the day and the decision being made to cancel our reading. Again, a bummer. But in the grand scheme of things it’s really a tiny blip compared to everyone being safe out here. After natural disasters like our Derecho in 2020 it’s not too hard to remind myself that a cancelled gig can be rescheduled but the damage mother nature can do on life and property is humbling. But damn it would have been fun ya know? Which brings me to the main course of today’s post. I wanted to share the excerpt I was planning on reading Friday night. From a short story I wrote while part of the Writer’s House fellowship. It’s also what I submitted to win the WEX award and wind up here in a rained out Manhattan. I’m so proud of this piece. I remember feeling like I wanted to write exactly how I wanted, with no excuses holding me back. (E.g. saying it wasn’t up to my standards because I procrastinated then rushed it at the end, or that I didn’t get to fully tell the story.) No I would devote the time and word count to tell it right. It’s also a good hint at where I want to go in the future with my writing. The memoir was fulfilling but my true love is fiction. Okay okay, without further ado. Here’s an excerpt from the top of my short story Maijoma, My Sister.
The views from the backseat window were of scant brush and jagged thistles, passing flora marked by its thirst for rain. My dad was driving the last leg of his homeward journey in silence while my mom napped in the front seat. The city of Ojinaga was in our rearview mirror. The orange trees that lined its streets diminished from sight as my dad drove, its swatches of dust and sepias, like old photographs of relatives, specks in the reflection as we took the highway to my father’s hometown. We were driving through the Mexican state of Chihuahua, about an hour from the city of Ojinaga, to the pueblo of Maijoma, pronounced like “My Home Uh.”
My skin stuck to the sunlit backseat as I shifted my position. The heat and discomfort made it hard for me to remember, to align the passing landscape with any memories from my childhood. It had been fifteen years since our family last made this trek to Mexico. A twenty-hour drive. Starting from my small hometown of West Liberty, Iowa, through the border city of Ojinaga, and to the even smaller, secluded village my dad grew up in. Fifteen years ago, my older sister Maria was with me in the backseat. We were leaving a quinceañera we attended in Ojinaga for her. It wasn’t Maria’s quinceañera but, with her being fourteen years old, my parents planned it so we would be a part of the ceremony. They hoped she could get a taste of what she would be experiencing in a year’s time. That it would excite her. All I remember of the celebration was that, at nine years old, I was too young to be an escort, a chambelán. I was happy when the formal pomp of the ceremonies were over and I could run outside the dusty dance hall with the other young boys. Away from the adults drinking and partying. Away from the teenagers playing dress-up. The bailes in Ojinaga were the same as the ones in Iowa. Dark and full of bodies. When us kids would open the doors to run outside, cigarette smoke would billow out toward the night sky. I remember brushing sand onto the back seat of the car when the night’s festivities were over. From my clothes. From my hair and shoes and onto the car floor. We were heading from the hall to Maijoma in the darkness. A couple years prior my sister would have dominated the rest of us in the muddy games outside the bailes. But now she was pristine and dressed up beside me. Her hair all bangs like Selena on Johnny Canales. She sat looking outside her car window. Her face coming into and out of the light of the passing street lamps. It had been fifteen years and my parents were in the front seat driving the same drive from Ojinaga to Maijoma. The sunlight overexposed the views from our car. I was trying to remember. To think about what she could have been thinking. Was it about how when you leave Ojinaga, it feels like you’re leaving civilization behind? A road off the highway leads to more and more unserved roads, until it feels like you’re driving along paths that don’t quite feel tended by any definitive entity but rather forged by the repeated treks of a select people, going to visit family.
It was spring break from college courses and my parents told me, “This could be the last time you see your grandparents before they die. You need to go.” It was not the first spring break where they used this reasoning to entice me to visit Maijoma, but it was the first time the reasoning worked. It had been a while since I’d even hung out with my immediate family, let alone the decade-plus since I’d seen mis abuelos. The spring break was a respite from the courses that I was taking. As the first one in my family to attend college, I was not taking the transition well. I wasn’t failing or anything like that, but something seemed off. The last couple of times I walked up to the building of one of my classes, I slowed at the entrance. Fighting what I now know as panic attacks. I stood before the entrance, unable to cross, trying to catch my breath as others walked by me unaware.
I was at ease in the back seat of my parent’s car in comparison, as I let the worry of school and life dissipate. As I tried to recall my memories. I was thinking of mis abuelos and my memories of this place. My dad slowed our car before a makeshift gate. I was thinking of my sister. We’d been at this gate before, or at least it felt like we had. For all I knew there were thousands of gates like this one dotting Mexico’s landscape. Wood posts and barbed wire erected by herders and ranchers, by families like ours. This could have been any other gate, but as my dad got out of the car, he approached it with familiarity. My memory aligned with my dad’s confidence in movement. We actually had been here before. The last time we stopped here my apá was already at the gate by the time Maria and I got out of the car to meet him.
“Okay, ayudame. With this here. Aquí. Look,” Apá said to Maria and me back then, as he pulled at the rotting wood post. We each grabbed part of the post and dragged it away from the fence, the attached barbed wire falling into a netlike mass, scratching a pattern along the dirt. We propped the heap of wood and wire along itself. My mom pulled the station wagon through as we stood under the desert moon and stars. “Ya, let’s put it all back up behind us.” Our dad said after we got the gate closed, he directed my mom to turn off the side and follow him as he walked through the dust. “We should get some gas here,” he said as he stepped aside and waved my mom through.
“What are you talking about? There’s no gas stations,” Maria said as we walked alongside our apá. As I looked around, there was only the same desolation we had been driving through since Ojinaga. No signs of a gas station, no buildings or people of any kind. My mom laughed at our confusion as she got out of the car. My dad walked over and knelt down at a random spot with the same intent he had shown at the gate. He pulled at a hose emanating from the ground.
“Yeah, it’s still here. They still got it,” he said to himself. He put his mouth around the hose until he spit out what looked like oil. The dark fluid poured from the hose as my dad beckoned for Maria to bring a gas can closer. On the transition, the fluid splashed and soiled Maria’s shirt as we laughed. This felt like a secret treasure, an X marked on a map somewhere, for families to show themselves as they drove through the isolation. After my dad finished filling the gas can, it began to rain. Big, fat drops that stung with cold.
How fitting that the excerpt ends with the rain, no? I swear that was not pre-planned! Oh yeah one quick thing before I go. Some really cool news is coming through. Definitely stay tuned. Hope to share next week, but like the weather Today, it's good to always be prepared for things changing. But if it does happen it'll be sweet.
(If you couldn’t tell by that clunky prose…there might be a clue or two in there lol) More soon!
-C