UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

NO US WITHOUT THEM: PENGUINS, LIZARDS AND THE BORDER WALL by José Antonio Rodríguez

I love the steady and dignified waddle of the emperor penguin. It’s a beautiful species that for years I dreamed I would one day see in person on some transformative trip to Antarctica, that austere land where life affirmed itself almost in defiance of the harsh landscape. A landscape vastly different than the south Texas/Mexico border where I grew up and where I live. Eventually, though, I realized that my presence would inevitably disrupt the penguins and that my joy would come at least in some measure at their expense. Therefore, if I truly appreciated their existence, I would have to stay away.

It was this same logic that for years kept me away from the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, a 2088-acre parcel of abundant biodiversity located here in the southern tip of Texas. I appreciated that it was home to so much life, and I also understood the reasoning behind encouraging visitors who might otherwise not come to appreciate the biodiversity in our backyards. I didn’t need to go, though, comforted by the knowledge that at least a small corner of this subtropical ecosystem threatened by urban sprawl was protected. Then the unthinkable happened: Donald Trump became president. Let me rephrase that: the worst-case scenario happened.

After then President Bush Jr’s signature of the Secure Fence Act in 2006, south Texas got a version of a border wall, more like separate sections of one in different iterations – a mix and match of concrete levee-border walls, 18 foot tall bollards, and Jersey barriers. Despite the objections to them by the community, they went up, the nearest one standing adjacent to part of the World Birding Center in Hidalgo, only a 15-minute drive from my childhood home in McAllen. These sections of walls remain ugly in every way, but I found some solace in the knowledge that life in all its forms might circumvent them, though they were a proven danger for border crossers.

What the new president proposes, though, is worse and is prefaced by the most blatant xenophobic rhetoric splayed on national media outlets. His plan is an even larger and more continuous wall that would cut through the entire area, including the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. And yes, this upsets me for all the reasons that you, the reader, may already suspect: the wall would disrupt and in some cases decimate the non-human life of not only the Refuge but of the entire northern Mexico/southern Texas region. It would also wreak political havoc between the United States and Mexico. It would also damage cultural relations between the communities on both sides of the border marked here by the Rio Grande, or the Río Bravo, if you stand on the river’s southern edge. It would directly endanger the very lives of undocumented immigrants.

A few weeks ago, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club organized an event at the Refuge to raise awareness about the proposed wall. I visited and was heartened to see their representatives spreading the word through social media and signed postcards destined for Senator Cronyn requesting a public hearing. Eventually I moved away from the crowds, walked the trails among a great array of native plants and a few creatures visible to the naked eye. I suspected most of the animals would still hide away from any hint of human contact. Then I saw it—a lizard skittering away. Then I saw another one, then another. Some of them took a second to eye me before running off. For a brief moment I felt like my five-year-old self wandering through the brush in the ejido in Mexico where I was born, where I spent the first years of my life. The ejido, a collective of subsistence farming, is hidden away a few kilometers from the border town of Nuevo Progreso. Before my family emigrated to the U.S. in the name of survival, I spent my days chasing lizards through and around the one room house with its earthen floor, or eating tiny yellow berries from the granjeno, or wandering through the brush of mesquite, cactus, and huisache, marveling at the turtles with their beautiful checkered shells and love of prickly pear.

All this came back to me in the quiet of the refuge. I felt nostalgia then but also a simmering anger like a low-grade fever, anger at the myths sold to me as truths in the classrooms of American schools —the myth of the self-made man who achieves success with no one’s help and creates wealth seemingly out of thin air, the myth of Manifest Destiny which is the self-made-man myth superimposed on the nation. Under their logic, social forces don’t exist and so success comes to those who want it most. Under their logic, nature is there to be exploited, and America is wealthier because it is filled with self-reliant and therefore superior people, not because its government has exploited and impoverished other nations, like those in Latin America. Under their logic, a wall is justified because it keeps the inferior people who have only themselves to blame for their poverty out of the superior people’s nation. This is self-interest and self-aggrandizement disguised as objective reason, disguised as common sense. And unless this dangerous logic, this lie, is disavowed —unless the nation comes to understand the interrelatedness of all life, human and non-human, and the fact that wealth is only possible through the appropriation of finite natural resources— I fear that the literal and metaphorical walls won’t stop, that all life will be endangered then, even the emperor penguin in Antarctica.

But I do what I must and what I cannot help: I write and bear witness to this world evermore splintered, bordered, and policed by a people obsessed with category and hierarchy, with concrete and bullets, disdainful of a natural world foreign to and traumatized by these borders, a natural world from which we are born and from which we can never escape. The lizard, the mesquite, the river, the penguin are all made of the same elements, the same atoms that constitute us, the same atoms that are the light of the sun and the stars. This is a truth greater than any wall, a truth that the powerful ignore to the detriment of every living thing in the Refuge, which is them, which is us. And so I write. And hope. And despair. And hope.
 


JosĂ© Antonio RodrĂ­guez’s most recent book is the memoir House Built on Ashes. His work has appeared in journals and magazines like The New Yorker, The New Republic, POETRY, and The Texas Observer. He lives in south Texas and is assistant professor of creative writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. Learn more at www.jarodriguez.org.

DREAMING HOME by Ana Menéndez

I’m obsessed with the landed aristocracy: The great-great granddaughter of a countess who lives with her husband and four children in her family’s 16th century palazzo. The heiress who grew up on a 17,000-acre ranch in Uruguay. The scion of a shipping family who just renovated the 300-year old family home in Santorini.

I meet these exotic apparitions in the pages of thick, slippery magazines that arrive mysteriously in my house, sometimes tucked between the pages of the more austere New York Times, sometimes delivered, unbid, through the mail. Over pages and pages of saturated color, I am generously offered a privileged glimpse into the daily lives of families whose fantastic wealth stretches back to the time of the Medici. Unworthy, I am nevertheless invited into sitting rooms decorated with portraits of elegant Dukes, bathrooms of double height ceilings that loom over original marble tubs. Cavernous receiving rooms decorated with 18th century tapestries, hand-carved mahogany tables and amusing trinkets collected by generations of inhabitants including this flea-market find, an oil in the style of Tintoretto, scored just last year by the current owner on a visit to Rome.

Sometimes, I learn of the rigors of a two-year renovation (dead owls, rotting wallpaper) that ends by revealing magnificent frescoes, hand-forged bricks and ancient mosaics once trod by silk-slippered ancestors.

I don’t envy these people – not exactly. Neither am I tempted – not really — to ridicule them. My feelings, as I temporarily inhabit these full-color lives, are much more nuanced and complicated. I am gruesomely fascinated by these eternally wealthy bloodlines, and I simply cannot look away. I know the next magazine will arrive, the next family will open their Tuscan Villa to my commoners’ eyes, and I will succumb to the fantasy, as surely as my own peasant ancestors did, gazing from the doors of their wooden huts to the towers of unreachable wealth beyond.

* * *
I come from a long line of emigrants. Which is another way of saying, I come from enduring peasant stock – for sometimes the wealthy meet violent ends, but it is more often the poor who leave.

My great-grandparents on my mother’s side – illiterate tenant farmers from Lebanon’s northern hinterlands – fled their homes in 1908, chased by hunger and persecution. They hopped a ship to Mexico. When it stopped in Cuba, they got off. I imagine them saying, this is good enough. Or far enough.

My mother’s father also fled the poverty of Asturias in the early 20th century. He too found refuge, at least for a time, in Cuba. On my father’s side, they were also running: from Asturias, Canary Islands and, even, Scotland.

Varadero, GĂŒines and Havana suited them all just fine. Until, of course, it was time to pull up roots and move again. As 20th century migrations go, theirs were relatively gentle. Enough so that I can joke now that if our family had a crest, its motto would be, “This is Bullshit, I’m out of Here.”

Otherwise, no, we don’t have a crest. No Counts or Duchesses dot my lineage. There is not a drop of blue blood in my veins. My middle-class parents left their modest possessions behind when they left Cuba in the early 1960s. And then they started over, in the family tradition.

My family, unless you count the green and white plates bought with S&H stamps in the 1970s, does not keep heirlooms. There is no august family homestead for me to return to. No treasure-filled rooms. No silver for my son to inherit.

My family’s legacy is of a different sort: Of humor, myth and constant movement. My writing and my restlessness stands as a kind of resonance to their lives, the hum left over from the explosion of their collective flight.

And yet I count myself luckier than a Duchessa in a Calabrian Palazzo. For a child of the 20th century – that era of mass migration, murder and upheaval – to have never experienced homelessness or statelessness is, after all, a special kind of good fortune. My movements, in contrast to those of my ancestors, have all been undertaken with joy. I’ve lived in places that don’t reach the level of family palaces, and yet still overflow with a comfortable luxury that my great-grandmother, married at 13 and a refugee at 15, would not have even been able to imagine.

Exile, Joseph Brodsky famously noted, is a linguistic event. For those of us living in the aftermath, it is also an inherited condition. We inherit first the stories and creation myths that are always travel-ready: light, easy to unpack, containing multitudes. Even those of us who proudly proclaim that we have unshackled ourselves from the political concerns of an older generation, still carry, deeper still, the DNA of flight and its corresponding refusal to commit to any place. We know – even if not consciously so – that if things get truly bad, we can always take off. We don’t call it cowardice. We call it a sense of adventure.
*

I am 47 years old now. Since I turned 21, I have moved 16 times and lived on four continents. I am the first voluntary exile in my brave line. And, a Cuban without a home, I pray to Jose Martí, patron saint of displacement: “In exile, men lose their moorings and find their bearings.”

I was three years old when I took my first flight. And I still remember it, albeit shaped in the surrealistic contours of childhood. In memory, my mother and I wave goodbye to my father, working in his yard, and ascend into the marvelous flying machine that, after impressive shaking that spills my Coca-Cola, lands in a different place entirely.

Flight never lost its romance. Throughout childhood, I would gaze at a plane flying over head and grow wistful, imagining the great adventures that awaited those secreted within. Even now, burdened by the memory of security hassles and middle-aged fears, I still feel a surge of wonder watching a 747 take off into the haze.

But it’s never been so much the act of flying itself, as the promise of movement, of renewal. Opening the door to a new house, getting lost in the streets of a new city, the seduction of arrival and the saudade of leaving: all of these wash me onto the shores of a barely expressible land, a place that exists for me alone, my private version – amid so much wandering – of home.

Home. How many emotions – both noble and ignoble – have been heaped onto the slender shoulders of that word? How many clichĂ©s have marred its romance? Is it ever really sweet? Is it where the heart is? Can the homeland ever be secure?

What does it mean to be from a place? And can one choose to be from nowhere? I was born in Los Angeles, went to elementary school in Tampa, high school in Miami, worked in Santa Ana, studied in New York City and, finally as an adult, lived in New Delhi, Istanbul, Cairo, Amsterdam and Maastricht.

“Where are you from?” people ask on my travels. And first I have to figure out what they really want to know.

One of the many reasons I love poetry is that it reminds us that we are not so unique. Lots of others have come this way before us.

In Miami, I am Cuban. In California, I was Latina. In India, I was Western. And in Afghanistan I was Woman. So I turn to the Zen poet Wang Wei, who smiles kindly and says, “In mountain forests, I’ve lost myself completely/ identity’s nothing but the role we play in public.”
I am a journalist and novelist. But I am not too proud to admit that truth resides with the poets. I once wrote an entire novel in a half-hearted attempt to say what Matsuo Basho had economically illuminated in a few lines:

“Days and months are travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind – filled with a strong desire to wander.”

I am being only half facetious when I say that it must nevertheless be a burden to live in the same house your family has occupied for three centuries. The same year-hardened walls. The exhausted thresholds. A problem unique to the one percent, of course. But still enough to blunt our envy.

For travel is not enough. To live the world, you must live in it. Visiting New Delhi is different from setting up house there, waiting out the long seasons through the other worldly heat of summer, the bliss of monsoon and the leveling chill of winter. Visiting Istanbul is different from growing so used to the haunting call to prayer that it no longer wakes you in the night. The Cairo of the tourist is not the Cairo of the expatriate is not the Cairo of the wealthy Cairene, is not the Cairo of the slum.

Only by going to sleep every night and waking every morning for years and years in a foreign place can you come to terms with your own vanity, recognize your accepted truths for the borrowed garments that they are. Only after a life of movement, do you understand where stillness lies.
* * *
After Delhi, I move back to New York City for a time. Then Istanbul, where my first marriage ends. After a three-year stop in Miami, I leave again — this time, and for the first time, on my own. I land in Cairo in August of 2008. Two weeks later, I meet Peter, a fellow wanderer. Born in Czechoslovakia, he went on the road as soon as the wall fell. Just recently he’d lived in Miami. We learn that until we had both picked up and moved half way across the world, we had been neighbors in South Beach.

Early on, I make sure to close off any possibility of marriage. Even the most amicable divorce leaves scars. “Marriage is the tomb of love,” I tell Peter one day. We are floating in a Cairo pool, surrounded by expatriates and I am quoting Edith Templeton.

Two and a half years later, I give birth to our son in Amsterdam. We live for a time in Maastricht. And then in 2014, we move back to Miami. Peter and I both use that construction, “we are moving back”, though neither of us were born here, though we both lived other lives here. My parents and sister still live in Miami, so for me, the city is the closest thing to home. I am glad to return, though the city, the family and I have changed, irrevocably. Landing at MIA, the relentless sprawl of traffic and construction below us, Wang Wei returns to admonish me again: 
nothing’s left of ancestral villages now./Out beyond cloud, it’s all empty as origin.

We buy a house, a three-bedroom, two-bath mid-century bungalow on a street named after a philosopher. It has a small yard and a wood deck out back. Less than a 10-minute walk away is the beach, where I run most mornings. My privilege, after half a life time of travel, remains intact.

Most surprising of all: we get married. One Friday afternoon in September, we take our son and my parents down to Miami Beach City Hall and swear to honor one another in good times and in bad. We exchange rings. Then we go for lunch at a favorite old haunt on South Beach. I order the fish. And by the time we return to our house, I can hardly breathe. At first I blame it on my dress – it was a bit tight. But when I take it off, I notice that my chest is covered with a violent red rash. My windpipe is closing. I take a Benadryl. I splash my face with cold water and lie down. After a few moments, I can breathe again. Later, a doctor tells me it was likely a reaction to improperly stored fish. But on our wedding day, my new husband takes my measure. He lifts a wry eyebrow.

“Clearly,” he says, “You are allergic to marriage.”

Maybe we’re both still worried that marriage might really be the tomb of love. I broke off one engagement in my twenties. Divorced my first husband in my thirties. And discouraged a proposal or two before finally returning to the altar at the age of 44. It’s no secret that I only succumbed this time because, unless we married, I would not be eligible to join my husband on his insurance plan.

But this late and gentle marriage suits me. Family finally suits me. I have a good man by my side, someone attracted to my ambition for a change. A man willing to take three years out of his career to care for our son — our funny, exquisite little boy – so I could do work that appealed to me. It’s almost as if I’ve received not a second chance, but a completely new life; a rare and precious do-over in middle-age.

I feel content, though not settled. Because I know this is not our last move. Even after all these years, travel retains its electric joy. Arriving is a kind of transfiguration. To open the front door to a new house, to inhabit a fresh layout and walk unfamiliar streets is to be reborn into a new and wiser self.

Two years later, after the insane, anxiety-laced election of 2016, I make frequent threats to move back to Europe. My suggestion to buy a catamaran and dock in the Mediterranean for the next four years is met with nervous laughter. I remind Peter of the family motto: “This is bullshit, I’m out of here!” One blue fall day my five-year-old son, the heir to our tradition, points at the long, white contrails of a plane passing high over head.

“Look, Mami, how beautiful. I would love to be on that plane!”

And yet: here we are in Surfside. We know the climate is changing. We know the sea is rising. We know we are vulnerable to the winds of politics and fate. And yet: We put in a new roof, install a new air conditioning system. We take down the old windows and iron bars and replace them with expensive glass that promise to keep us safe during a hurricane. We buy new appliances for the kitchen. We redo the landscaping, paint the walls, take out the old attic insulation and replace it with the latest thing. We build new bookcases and fit them with books in six languages. We hang our art on the walls, lay my two Afghan carpets on the marble floor. We fill our home with old objects and new promises of permanence. We do these things even though we know it is all temporary, because everything is temporary, even for the Dukes and Duchesses, even when we imagine it otherwise.

 


Ana Menéndez is the author of four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan and India, where she was based for three years. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and an M.F.A. from New York University. A former Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, she now lives in Surfside, Florida.

THE SANTERA IN #4209 by Beverly Tan Murray

by Beverly Tan Murray

 

Yossi’s keys clanged as we trudged down the stairs. He said that back in the 60’s, this building was filled with Jews.

“You couldn’t take a shit without looking up and seeing a mezuzah,” he said. “Then the Cubans moved in. Nu? So here we are.”

When we got outside, the smells of ropa vieja drifted over from Puerto Sagua. Yossi lit a cigarette. “Look,” he began. “I don’t even want to be a landlord. This is a favor for my sister, understand? $550 a month furnished, on South Beach? This is best deal.” I nodded and took in Washington Avenue at dusk, an adult Legoland burnished in amber brushstrokes. Then, carajo! A man sped past on his bicycle, narrowly missing Yossi by inches. Yossi swore. The man shook his fist, ass muscles flexing as he rode off in his tiny pink thong with a South African parrot on his shoulder.

“Ben zonah!” screamed Yossi.

“I’ll take the apartment,” I said.

It was March 16th, 2004. My third day in Miami.

On move-in day, La Gorda came over with a case of Mountain Dew. “For when you thirsty,” she said, and told me that she lived two doors down in #4209, that my hair reminded her of her abuelita who was chinita too, and to please call her La Gorda because you know, and slapped her belly mirthfully. I stuck my hand out, and La Gorda laughed.

“Mija, you’re in Miami now, you gotta learn how to kiss hello. Like this, mwah-mwah.”

On that Sunday morning when it rained so hard that the water sloshed up over the sidewalk, I went downstairs to do my laundry. La Gorda called down the stairwell as I staggered back up, still buzzed from the vodka Red Bulls I had swilled the night before. “La Chinita linda!” she yelled. “You busy?” I said no, I had no plans apart from re-hydrating and folding laundry. La Gorda took one look at my bloodshot eyes and laughed. “Come in,” she said. “I give you cafe con leche and psychic reading. I do for you free. Porque your energy – is que amazing.”

La Gorda’s apartment looked as though it was furnished by someone who was rushing to get to her destination, but got lost and set up camp along the way. She had lived in her unit for nine years, yet there was a palpable feeling of impermanence. One fold-up card table, four foldable chairs, a futon in the corner. The walls were completely bare, save for a small picture of San Lázaro taped up above the transistor radio. For some reason, I felt like I was nine again, watching a movie that I was told not to watch. La Gorda shuffled out of the kitchen with a steaming cafe con leche and two slices of Cuban toast. “Sit. Eat,” she said. “You eat, I do reading.”

I sipped my cafe con leche as La Gorda reached into the bookcase behind her. She pulled out a drawstring purse, and emptied out its contents onto the table. They were small, round pebbles, the kind one would find at Home Depot. La Gorda explained that they were from Peru and had special powers, piedras mágicas, some extra strong juju from the old shamans whom you do not want to fuck with. She said that the stones could see everything – past, present, and future. They could foretell your destiny, divine the unique arc of your fate, no matter if you had glittering riches, or were a desamparado on the street. The stones, she wagged her finger. The stones always know.

As she mixed the stones with her hands, a low, guttural noise rose up inside of her. La Gorda rocked back and forth in her chair. Slowly, rhythmically at first. Then, faster and faster, picking up speed, until even the card table was thrumming an accompanying tune. “Convoco a los santos!” she yelled, throwing up her hands each time. “Convoco a los santos!”

I was no stranger to psychic readings. But my past experiences were limited to benign tarot card sessions with Irvine housewives in designer hippie gear. This was intense. When La Gorda’s eyeballs rolled back and she started sputtering in tongues, face flushing bright red as if running from a mob, I panicked. I briefly considered: Clearing my throat (she wouldn’t hear me), asking politely if she was communing with anyone in particular (she’d ignore me), and sitting quietly until she finished.

I chose the latter.

So we sat, La Gorda rocking and moaning and crying and pleading, arms raised to los santos for their ethereal wisdom, me eating Cuban toast in quiet horror. I watched as she invoked all manner of saints, her voice switching between a man’s bassy timbre, and a child’s soft whimper. You’re bugging out, I scolded myself. She’s being nice.

Chill.

The rocking slowed to a few quiet creaks, then stopped. I looked up. La Gorda was glaring right at me, breath rising and falling in ragged gasps, beads of sweat dotting her upper lip. Scattered on the floor were the magic pebbles, which La Gorda pointed to with a snort.

“You know what this say?”

“No.”

“You no have fe. You no believe in Jesus. You think you boss, yes?”

“I’m agnostic
” I began to say, but La Gorda cut me off. The stones had spoken, the spirits had rendered their verdict. It was clear that all my woes were caused by a terrible lack of faith. But today was my lucky day, she said. For $40, she, La Gorda, would intercede on my behalf. She alone could plead with los santos to seek forgiveness from Jesus, the better to free my blackened soul, Dios mio.

My cynical side thought her pitch was pretty funny, but my instincts screamed bullshit. “Uh, I think I’m good, La Gorda,” I said. “But thank you for your time. This was fun.” La Gorda pressed on. “$40 es nada. For $40, I make you free.” From certain misery, heartache from men, demonic possession. “San Lázaro talk to Jesus. Pero me, La Gorda – I talk to San Lázaro. Comprende?” I nodded yes, and started toward the door. One thing about living in Miami – you learn quickly when shit’s about to get real.

La Gorda stood up. “You pay me now,” she said. “For all my time.”

“You said it was free!” I protested.

She waved her hands irritably. The reading was free, the bargaining with San LĂĄzaro was extra.

I made it out of the living room, and halfway to the front door when I heard a blood curdling shriek.

“Puta!” she screamed. I turned to see the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. A Barbie doll, painted black, with her eyes gouged out. “You will die four years from now! Exactly four years! Maldicion hacia tu! Puta!” A spitball flew at me and missed by inches. I sprinted to the front door and flung it open, La Gorda hot on my heels.

Before escaping, I did something completely out of character. I turned to face La Gorda, who was now half-singing a stream of curses with her eyes rolled back, whipping Demon Barbie back and forth in a furious interpretive dance.

“Fuck you, La Gorda,” I said. “Those pebbles are bullshit.” Then I shot her the bird, slammed the door, and ran out.
A new case of Mountain Dew appeared on my doorstep three days later. An olive branch. By then, I had made friends with Carolina, the Colombian print model in #4310. Carolina had shrieked with laughter when I told her about my La Gorda episode. She told me that La Gorda had tried to fleece just about every newcomer to the building. That I had nothing to worry about, because La Gorda wasn’t a real santera. Just a hustler from Matanzas, getting by on quips and folksy charm, surviving the only way she knew how.

“But what do I do with this Mountain Dew?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t drink it,” said Carolina. “Just in case.”

The possibly-cursed Mountain Dew stayed unmolested in my pantry for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, La Gorda and I settled into an uneasy truce. I’d wave hello, and she’d give me the what’s up nod. From time to time, we’d make small talk about the carpet stains in the hallway, or the humidity outside. Gone were the offers of cafe con leche and Cuban toast, of prayers to save my mortal soul. On move-out day, La Gorda held the elevator door open as I trundled in a dolly of boxes. She wished me good luck, told me to call home more, and to light a candle to San Lázaro every night.

On April 16th, 2008, I did not die. That night, I went out with my girlfriends and pounded shot after shot of JĂ€gerbombs, not caring that I would upchuck them later in a torrent of vomit. The date had been circled in red ink on my calendar, a ticking psychological time bomb courtesy of La Gorda. Carolina was right. She was just a hustler, nothing more. Still, I stopped by the corner bodega to buy a candle to light for San LĂĄzaro when I got home.

Just in case.

 

Beverly Tan Murray is a Chinese-American author who was born in Singapore and immigrated to California at age 16. She now resides in Miami with her husband and a terrier-mutt named Larry David. Beverly is a VONA/Voices alumnus, and has been published in the Huffington Post, AWAY Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Lime Hawk. She writes short stories about life in liminal spaces, and has yet to find the perfect carne asada taco.