The next morning I found a braid of his hair under my bed. That’s where my shoes went, so when I went for them the next morning I found the braid. When I got downstairs my mom told me I had to go.” Fina walked over to the window and opened it. “It’s better if we get some air in here. This room needs to breathe. I can get you more blankets if you get cold.”
“I’m fine,” I said. Which wasn’t true. A breeze came in and it felt like my arms and back were being scraped by it. I pulled the blankets up to my chin. “This was in New Mexico?”
“Las Cruces,” she said. “My mom put me on a bus out here to Oakland, where my uncle owned a restaurant. When I got here I got the abortion. And then I got real sick. Off and on for about a year. Worse than you are now, but the same kind of thing. The kind of sick that knocks you down and doesn’t let you up. I wrote my mom to ask for help. She sent me a clump of fur, told me to bury it at the western base of a cactus.”
“Clump of fur?”
“About this big.” She made a fist and held it up for me to see.
“Did that work?”
“Not right away. Eventually I stopped getting sick.”
“So was the curse just that you got sick?”
“That’s what I thought, but now, with everything that’s happened…” She turned and looked to the door. The phone was ringing downstairs. “I should get that,” she said, and stood up to leave. “Get some sleep.”
I stretched and a hard shiver ran through me. I pulled the blankets over my head. This was that part of the fever where you get so cold you gotta sweat to break it. Hot and cold, with sweat shiver running through and over me, I thought about the night that broke through the windows and walls of our house and brought me to the bed I was doing my best to get better in.
* * *
—
Me and my dad had both moved from the couch to the kitchen table for dinner when the bullets came flying through the house. It was like a wall of hot sound and wind. The whole house shook. It was sudden, but it wasn’t unexpected. My older brother, Junior, and my uncle Sixto had stolen some plants from someone’s basement. They’d come home with two black garbage bags full. Hella stupid. That much weight, like some shit wasn’t tied to it. Sometimes I’d crawl through the living room to get to the kitchen, or watch TV on my stomach on the floor.
That night, whoever got their shit stolen by my stupid-ass brother and uncle, they rolled up on our house and emptied their guns into it, into the life we’d known, the life our mom and dad spent years making from scratch. My dad was the only one to get hit. My mom was in the bathroom, and Junior was in his room at the back of the house. My dad put himself in front of me, blocked the bullets with his body.
* * *
—
Lying in bed wishing for sleep, I didn’t want to but couldn’t help but think of Six. That’s what I used to call him. My uncle Sixto. He called me Eight. I hadn’t really known him growing up, but after my dad died he started to come around a few days every week. Not that we said much to each other. He’d come over and turn on the TV, smoke a blunt, drink. He let me drink with him. Passed me the blunt. I never liked getting high. Shit just made me feel hella nervous, made me think too much about the speed of the beat of my heart—was it too slow, would it stop, or was it too fast, would it fucking attack? I liked to drink though.
After the shooting Junior stayed out even more than usual, claimed he was gonna fuck those guys up, that it meant war, but Junior was all talk.
Sometimes me and Six would be watching TV in the afternoon, and the sun would come in through one of the bullet holes, one of the ones in the wall, and I could see the fucking dust in the room float in a bullet-hole-shaped ray of light. My mom had replaced the windows and the doors, but she hadn’t bothered to fill