Mother’s Captured Breath

It’s odd, how things have fallen into place. How they fit together like legos. How this has been erected from the ground, several balloons. My tenth birthday party, Tony Mendisco’s sweaty unibrow and the prepubescent facial fuzz that looked up to the sky as he cut the red, white and blue of my mother’s contained breath from their chair stakes.

“Quit it, Tony!” his mother, a fat lady sitting at the pic-nic table, slurping up ribs from her flimsy paper plate.

Sharing a birthday with America has always resonated in a frequency of inconvenience. My dislike of barbeque and neighbors that scattered against the backyard, eating my American flag birthday cake with plastic grins.

“You’re a true patriot aren’t ya, kiddo?”

“Cállate la boca ahí dentro!” A man yells out.

My cell is filled with an empty moan that comes from next door. What they have done finds its way through the cracks of the ceiling and drips onto them, I assume it stings.

The things that I’ve done accumulate in a puddle on the floor. Murky and cryptic in nature. At first this mystery did not frighten me, but as it grows, fills the cell slowly, threatens to suffocate me, I’ve grown afraid of it’s ambiguity. I thought this was a mistake, but as the hours grow longer, I’ve realized it’s not, that I am here for a reason. My body shakes with remembrance, while my mind sits in wake.

As the language of the unknown swims around me, I feel myself forgetting even more words, even more times. The darkness, the coldness of my cell, the Mexican flag hung in the hallway, is in exact opposition to the only memory sitting in my brain. The town park where my father is leaning over a public grill and the small light from the coal glows up his July kissed face, my breath playing over the screams from the other children’s game of tag which I’ve climbed into a tree to hide from. The fireworks will start soon and I like to be alone. Where has this day gone?

These memories find themselves in the spaces of my head that do not hurt, they pound too, but in a different way. The yelling from the guards down the hall frightens me when it approaches suddenly and slams me into the hallway.

“Levántate!” He kicks me. “Levántate!”

Him and another bring me to my feet, I begin to feel all the wounds that have been inflicted on my body and I feel frightened over what I do not remember, how I ache. All I can see in my eye is my parents and their friends and their children’s heads from the tree up above, how they speak in whispers of summer.

The men fling me down the hallway. One man holds a gun to my head while the other puts a sack over my face, I weep behind the veil. How far have I fallen from this tree I was perched in? The fireworks will start soon. Beat in time with my headache.

“Oh cállate y dinos!”

Somehow I understand this, but I do not speak.

“Dinos!”

“Que que?” I say

They grunt and punch me in the stomach, “Ya sabes.”

“Yo no.” and then I do, how I’ve fallen from that tree into my pool of unknown. How it’s cleared. How I remember what I’ve done.

“Si?” And I feel the gun press into my forehead. “Si?”

I know what I need to say, what I have to say, but I love to be alone too much, I love the way they sound when I’m in the trees, I love the way they look through the silhouette of leaves and branches, how they illuminate the sky into day. The only good part about my birthday being the same as America’s, I pretend it’s all for me.

“Si?” and the gun presses in even further.

“S-” and before I can finish the fireworks have cut me off. They’ve popped like buttery popcorn. They’ve lit up the sky just as I used to remember. Looking down I watch the bright eyes of everyone else looking up, they’re beautiful too, truly, they’re free.