Jenny—I think was her name—told me to come over, and when I got there, she, all dressed up, told me to sit down and wait on her bed, after which she brought out a shoebox from another room, took off the lid, and showed me the baby chick inside, saying, “You can look but can’t touch,” then she started, with hands already like those of a woman’s, to slap me hard across the face, again and again, until, upon hearing her mom call for her, she left the room with the door open, which I shut with my foot, so she wouldn’t see me put my hands in the box and squeeze until I heard a pop. …
Diana Marie Delgado
We were living in the projects of LA, on Lomita, and I got up a lot, I used to, in the middle of the night, and sometimes, halfway down the stairs, I’d see ghosts—shadows in our living room, crying. They used to have wakes inside the houses, my mom told me, and in Mexico if the soul died troubled, they would chop down the trees outside the dead one’s house, so it wouldn’t get caught in the branches. …
raised snakes, nothing legit; did it for fun in his mother’s laundry room. The newborns were the yellow kind and hung from his hands like heavy rings. The kids in the neighborhood, bored of riding bikes, would knock on his door and ask to touch them. “Don’t be scared,” he’d say when they hesitated, “They’re babies. And when something’s a baby, it can’t hurt you.” He gave me one to keep he said was a girl. I left it in an aquarium, on top of a nightstand, in the corner of my room, where it sat coiled on rocks beneath a heat lamp. Most days it didn’t move. Then, one afternoon, while I was napping, it found a way out and curled itself around my bedpost to get a better look at me. …
I turn on the radio and hear voices, girls becoming women after tragedy. Talk about dreams! His heart was covered in a thin shell the color of moon and when touched, I grew old. The best movies have a philosophy (Dorothy, after being subjected to girl-on-girl violence, is rescued). Someone hanged himself on that set, a man who loved but couldn’t have a certain woman. Management claimed it was a bird. The best movies begin with an encounter and end with someone setting someone free. In Coppola’s Dracula the camera chases women across a garden until they kiss. The man I loved, after many years, asked me to choke him in bed; later, cleaning a kitchen cabinet, I found a recipe he’d carved into the wood, and I had a hard time believing him. …