How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe: Chapters 42–56

He does this strange, grief- laden chuckle.

His voice is real deep and guttural.

I forgot I’d even said it, that’s how flippant it was to me.

Knowing any sample of teenage guys has skewed my expectations, I guess. Or maybe they’re normal and maybe Santiago is exemplary.

“Yes. And before you get all uppity about it, it’s real mint extract. I checked.”

The bullcrap with Star is burlap. Covering and chafing at my arms and neck. I resist the urge to scratch.

I wait until I’m out of Star’s and Chamomila’s sight. Don’t need to give them any more fodder.

The little spots of cerulean sky between bright clouds, the canopy of trees, all pine, larch, cypress, their tall green enveloping the whole earth with their needles.

We both talk about all the ways high school sucked and what it’s like to have a sibling infinitely more beloved for all the most shallow, superficial reasons.

Star’s face is ashen green.

Inside, my life savings of every cash birthday and Christmas gift along with proceeds from the photos I’d sometimes sell online.

So there’s that deep burnt orange, but it’s offset by green.

And then there’s the ficus tree, the yucca, the fiddle-leaf and the avocado and lemon trees, the snake plants, tall with each leaf thick and tapered like an arrow.

And I set the shutter for as long as it will go, and then the moths arrive, fluttering right toward Tía’s arbor, covered in moonflower vines.

Subservience...categorizations, sinners, and subjugation.

Subservience...categorizations, sinners, and subjugation.

In one, she’s a naive-looking housewife, gazing up at the camera from her kitchen floor, where she’s picking up spilled groceries.

And it seems kind of lame and sexist that once lots of women started taking pictures of themselves, it started to be called “selfies.” Something people like to mock, to dismiss as a symbol of vanity and narcissism.

And it amazes me, because those leaves are also ancient, made by those groves of trees and their mothers and their mothers and on and on and on. Everything, everything is part of a lineage.

Now, though, my appetite dwindles a little.

“Right, well, what got me into it was film. I’m really kind of a film buff, you know, British New Wave, Italian neorealism. And then from there I got interested in photography, you know, Robert Frank, Alfred Stieglitz, David Bailey.”

But for film, you know, I don’t only watch really obscure movies you’ve never heard of.

...he owes me a thousand carby meals for making me suffer through that pretentious restaurant and crappy conversation and his implications that I need to limit carbs in the first place.

I approach it slowly, maybe like how someone would tiptoe around an ornery beast.

Her hair has a half inch of mousy brown roots.

Star winces a little, but she doesn’t chastise me.

Um, maybe because the last time I saw you, you were destroying my camera and livelihood?

Santiago nods, and I sit down, suddenly acutely aware that I haven’t said a single word since I got here.

He smiles and chuckles and, Lord, okay, the tension wavers, but there’s something else between us.

And then the gumbo is presented, in wide, big bowls with a decorative taupe trim. Santiago digs right in, but I go much more slowly...and you know what? It completely rocks my socks off. Everything mixed together, the shrimp and chicken and sausage, all in that brown broth, over perfectly cooked rice.

I can’t form words. The combination of Santiago and fireweed has destroyed my faculties.

“Will you help me move them into my room?”
“Okay.” His answer is quick. Gruff. “I have a pallet....”

But somehow we focus on the tasks of slicing onions, mincing garlic, browning the beef and the pork.

I’m completely mesmerized by this process: giant, muscly, beautiful guy bending low over a cake so he can arrange the pink-petaled blooms perfectly.

Everyone is the center of the universe. Everything. Like Ana Mendieta said, how her art is connected “from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”