The Sleeping World Read Free

we didn’t. A kind of pulse stopped us, a lack of inertia when our boots hit flesh that didn’t resist. The man slowly pushed himself up onto his knees, one arm hanging limp. His face was bloody and his breathing whistled through broken ribs.
    â€œ Idiotas ,” Samo said beside me, “he’s a police officer.”
    â€œYou think I give a fuck?” Grito shouted through his bandana, still breathing heavily.
    The man lifted his broken face to us and grinned, his teeth dripping red.
    Grito dropped the crowbar. We turned and ran.

Two
    My abuela didn’t notice any change, or if she did, she herself did not change. She left the house only for Mass and to buy groceries. Her daily trips to the fruit seller, the bakery, the butcher used to last her all morning, but the old vendors had been replaced by their sons or nephews, and she had no one to talk to. They hurried her along, she said, like a log through a mill. She must have been happy in some way when the general died, but I think part of her didn’t believe he could. She believed that he would rise from the dead or that it was a trick to draw out the seditious elements and slaughter them. The general had taken too much from her to be truly gone.
    She set out my breakfast, a row of Maria cookies, even though it was almost midday by the time I stumbled into the kitchen. I turned on the burner to reheat the coffee. She snatched the moka pot out of my hands. “Don’t touch that,” she said. “That’s disgusting.” Her nails accidentally grazed the underside of my wrist, but they were too soft to make a mark.
    She poured out the old coffee and started a new pot. It was just me and her left living in the apartment.
    Last night’s events surfaced hesitantly. It wasn’t hard to push them back into the murky water. I wanted them to tunnel downthe shower drain with the sweat and booze leaking out of me, but that was too much to ask. Everything was carried. After I toweled off and dressed, I found my abuela watching a television musical in the kitchen. Her posture was perfect despite her age, and she watched every commercial and news report as if it had the same importance. The song was a cover of a ye-ye hit that had been on the radio years ago. A woman singing about how content her heart was, the trumpets and violins rising to meet her upbeat soprano notes. The singer and her backups danced around a gas station in white go-go boots and bright yellow uniforms that showed their midriffs and upper thighs. An old officer with stacks of medals on his chest sat watching them and smiled. It was an old show, dated and safe.
    â€œCan you believe this trash?” my abuela said. “Hardly any clothes at all.”
    She looked up at me from where she sat at the very edge of her gold-and-gray-brocade armchair, long fingers perched on the hand-knitted doilies that covered the almost half-century of wear. I was wearing a crumpled men’s black button-down, the sleeves chopped short and layers of flea-market silver chains tucked under the collar like a tie, and the combat boots La Canaria and I found after months of digging in the trash. I hadn’t let my abuela touch my jeans in weeks, and they were stiff with stains.
    â€œGood,” she said, and turned back to the television. “You stay serious.” She’d supported my going to university, though when I’d started, her butcher said that only women who weren’t going to be mothers went to university and women who weren’t going to be mothers were going to be whores.
    A glittering new kitchen appeared on the television screen, occupied by a housewife, one of those golden Spanish pillars, obedient and always pregnant, waxing her floors with orgasmic joy.
    â€œPathetic,” my abuela said. She rapped out a counter-beat to the jingle on the armchair. Above the television was an altar with photos of my parents and saints. In a closed compartment under