issue 25, 1999-2000
When my parents and I first arrived in Los Angeles,
we all slept badly. Together in the only room with a bed,
we tossed and turned, enveloped in the same bad dreams,
the weight of the thousands of miles we’d traveled
still heavy on our bodies: Havana, Madrid, Miami…
My mother heard about the earthquakes in California,
on the radio at work. One night when we had our first
television set, we watched footage of the 1906 San Francisco
quake. The way they come unannounced–only dogs
detect the change in the air, those rhythms deep under
ground, so she kept asking my father to bring home
a small dog, just to be safe. She took to buying supplies:
soap, bottled water, flashlights and batteries. The drawers
filled with them. At night when the rumbling started,
she woke up, woke us up, my father and I, in a sweat,
and she said, half asleep, “This is it. This is the big one.”
My father, eyes sealed with the days hard work, rolled over
and muttered: “It’s only the train passing by. That’s it.”
I slept in the hollows of their bodies, these concaves of soft
flesh, a child already ridden with too many adult-like fears.
“Next time for sure,” my mother said and held me tight.
—————
Virgil Suárez was born in Cuba in 1962. Since 1974 he has lived in the United States. He is the author of a multitude of books, including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. His two most recent books, 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW and THE PAINTED BUNTING'S LAST MOLT, were published by the University of Pittsburg Press.