"We Are Not From Here" by Jenny Torres Sanchez, Prologue–Part 1

Because you've also seen how blood turns brown as it seeps into concrete. As it mixes with dirt and the excrements and innards of leaking dead bodies.

Mamá was proud she’d haggled the guy for an hour, asking him, "Who wants to sit on velvet in one-hundred-degree humid weather?”

I run in the direction of Tía Lucia’s house, following the dust of Mamá’s scooter through the streets of our barrio, and catch up with Chico easily because I’m small and a fast runner—a good thing around here.

Just small-time criminals pretending to be the really bad guys to see if they could extort some easy money.

Chico and I sit outside on Tía’s patio and I think about that conversation as Pequeña’s labor screams travel through the house and out the door, cutting through the stagnant air to reach us.

I’ve surrounded it in a sac of resentment all these months and now it’s going to make me pay.

I try to conjure up La Bruja, my angel, who showed me those doors exist.

They are both oblivious to the water lapping at their ankles.

A wave comes crashing in through the doorway of the bedroom, and hits the bureau where Mami keeps her belongings.

Perfume bottles and talcum powder, needles and thread, a thimble, shiny hair clips and brooches she wears on very special occasions.

Our faces were bruised. Mamá noticed and questioned us relentlessly, our story constantly changing until finally, we admitted we’d been in a fight.

“I tell you what, I got a big shipment of drinks after Semana Santa last week—the celebrations around here wiped me out—so there are some sodas in the back I need put in the big cooler. You guys stock all those pallets I got back there, and I’ll give you two sodas for the price of one.”

He smiles a melancholy smile.

His face is sweaty, his hair disheveled.

“Your husband...” the man says, but he falters. He tries again. “Doña Agostina, I have terrible news...”

Mamá’s pleas to God for help sound foreboding in that still, silent room.

We sit on the patio, staring off into the distance at neighbors who’ve come out to be with and comfort Doña Agostina, and at those who only observe from their doorways even though the police have not arrived. Neither has the coroner.

The adrenaline starts ebbing away and I feel like rubber.

The stand-up fan oscillates between my bed and his thin mattress on the tiled floor.

The fan moves hot air around the stifling room.

So I go alone, look at a face that isn’t Don Felicio’s anymore. A face that’s gray and ashen, bloated and serious.

I watch him from the window; his knock is hard, hollow, incessant.

“I said I can’t believe it. What? You have a guilty conscience or something?”

I was happy he made it out, but sad to see Doña Agostina and Don Felicio distraught that he couldn’t return to visit them.

But the pungency of my blood, of my insides, of gushing water, lingers. Along with the sour milk that emanates from my shirt and skin.

But the pungency of my blood, of my insides, of gushing water, lingers. Along with the sour milk that emanates from my shirt and skin.

Doña Agostina holds her rosary and wails.

She lets out a breath. Exasperated. Annoyed.

But we enter and there is only silence. A room black and dank, a room that smells of blood, a mixture of sweet and sour. A room that smells of the odor of humans keenly aware they are about to die.

My mind flashes with the red, blue, pink—the diagram of a heart we drew in class earlier this year, the striated muscle and the tissue.

Maybe that’s what I need—to wrap my heart, myself in scar tissue. I think of the blood coagulating, the tissue fusing together.

I think of a thick scar forming over that tear. Over and over again. Over and over again. Until any pain is just a small, fleeting thing.

I stare at the way it flutters and flutters on that countertop, like a dark, frenzied moth.

From somewhere in those eyes, from inside its delicate mottled body, I hear a strange, high-pitched sound.

For the times we sat quiet in the kitchen as another mother from the barrio passed by our patio and stopped to lament to Mamá about the departure of another son they’d never see again.

His fingers dig into my skin, and he steers me toward his car conspicuously parked in front of our house.

Because I realize when death feels imminent, when it feels certain, all I want is to live.

A guy we hadn’t noticed steps out from the cover of lush trees behind the store.

The ache in my chest and thumping in my ears subsides.

At first I’m wary of the big guy who gets out, but then I see two elderly women get out the passenger-side door.