Linda Rodriguez

in my house. Days we’re ordinary, affectionate, a close, happy couple, but nights require a passport and serious immunizations, warnings about security and guerilla attacks. You are a foreign ruler, quite possibly benevolent in intention – but we know how these things always play out, don’t we? – with needs alien to and hostile to your citizenry, me, without power except to say, “No more,” and hope to survive the fallout from the battles in the streets. Days, we’re the peaceful, devoted pair all our friends envy. Nights are always tense around the DMZ that is our bed with occasional forays into the bush where the enemy is always lying in wait. Sleep is hard, fearful and troubled. I dream us going down in flames.

We set up an assembly line. I heat the tortillas in manteca after Crystal dips them in chile ancho and drains them. Niles carries full plates of hot tortillas to his father, who rolls them around spoonfuls of filling. When we’ve finished the hot, greasy work, I pour the last of the sauce over neat rows of stuffed tortillas, sprinkle them with cheese, clean the stove and counters. The kids help their father rinse plates and pans. They don’t know this is the last time. The cheese melts. Crystal dances to “No More Lonely Nights” on the radio. Niles and his dad joke and wrestle. After grace, we sit before steaming plates. The kids stuff their mouths, insult each other, and laugh. We can’t avoid their eyes forever. Their father and I stare at each other across the table.

his eyelids like a moth’s fringed wings. Arms flail against the Ninja Turtle sheet and suddenly-long legs race time. Awake, he’s a water-leak detector, a recycling ranger who bans Styrofoam and asks for beeswax crayons, a renewable resource. He wants to adopt the Missouri river, write the president to make factories stop polluting. They’re old friends, he and George Bush. He writes and scolds the president, every month or so, about the bombing the children of Iraq (he made his own sign to carry in protest), about the plight of the California condor and northern gray wolf, about more shelters and aid for the homeless. The lion-shaped bulletin board in his room is covered with pictures and letters from George, who must be nice, even if he is a slow learner. Joseph is a mystery fan, owns 54 Nancy Drews. Nancy’s his friend, along with Jo, Meg, and Amy and poor Beth, of course, whom he still mourns. He also reads of knights and wizards, superheroes, and how to win at Nintendo. The cats and houseplants are his to feed and water and the sunflower blooming in the driveway’s border of weeds. He drew our backyard to scale, using map symbols, sent off to have it declared an official wildlife refuge, left a good-night note on my pillow, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. In my life, I have done one good thing.

A mother possum crawled down the chimney the spring Donny came to us because both sets of his parents had kicked him out, the same April after your dad and I divorced when you kicked a hole in the dining room wall. The possum was swollen with young she would later carry, half-grown, on her back or hanging from her thick, hairless tail. “An oversized rat with maternal instincts,” your dad once said. Instead of one angry son, I now had two– fifteen and seventeen– two forged signatures on absence excuses, two discipline committee meetings, two conferences with the principal. While I worked, you shared contraband beer, as well as the basement bedroom with its fieldstone fireplace in which you found the possum one cool evening. Laughing and cheering, you teamed up to cage her with a trash can, carry her to the alley out back and dump her. The possum squeezed back down the chimney twice more. The third time you threw her out on Troost Avenue, screaming for a car to smash her beneath its tires. She must have been near her time, desperate for a nest, to crawl back down after that. The noise woke me after midnight. Donny had clubbed her with his nunchuks. You both kicked and stomped her head as she lurched, stumbled between your feet. Halfway down the basement steps I stopped, seeing your faces. The possum fell limp. I backed slowly up the stairs. In the morning, you couldn’t meet my eyes. I just made you clean up the mess.

The sudden pink shape surfacing in black-water lagoons shocked explorers. All dolphins share man’s thumb and fingerbones, but these also wear his flesh. When the river overflows and floods the varzea, these dolphins travel miles to splash in the shallows amongst buttress-roots of giant rainforest trees. The waters abate, trapping fish, dolphins never. A lamp burning dolphin oil blinds. At night the pink-flesh contours melt and blur. The flipper extends the hidden hand to lift its woman’s torso to the land. An Eve, born each night from the black Amazon, roams the dark banks for victims to draw to the water and death. Taboo to the Indians, this pink daughter of the river’s magic always looks, to explorers, like she’s smiling.