A gutsy, emotionally astute collection of stories that walks the reader over the hot coals of unnamed desire. — Ginu Kamani, author of Junglee Girl
Lara Stapleton takes us to a world in which everyone is intensely human and vulnerable, whether they are roaming the climate-controlled megamalls of Manila or the desolate streets of a Midwest town…With the precision of a microsurgeon, Stapleton dissects the subtle frustrations of the heart, picking out details and tell-tale cracks that make life seem so fragile, and therefore dear. The stories in The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing are an unflinching look into lives of quiet desperation, and an auspicious debut for its young author. —Eric Gamalinda, editor, Flippin’: Filipinos on America
A gutsy, emotionally astute collection of stories that walks the reader over the hot coals of unnamed desire. — Ginu Kamani, author of Junglee Girl
Lara Stapleton takes us to a world in which everyone is intensely human and vulnerable, whether they are roaming the climate-controlled megamalls of Manila or the desolate streets of a Midwest town…With the precision of a microsurgeon, Stapleton dissects the subtle frustrations of the heart, picking out details and tell-tale cracks that make life seem so fragile, and therefore dear. The stories in The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing are an unflinching look into lives of quiet desperation, and an auspicious debut for its young author. —Eric Gamalinda, editor, Flippin’: Filipinos on America
The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing: Short Stories
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The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing: Short Stories
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Overview
A gutsy, emotionally astute collection of stories that walks the reader over the hot coals of unnamed desire. — Ginu Kamani, author of Junglee Girl
Lara Stapleton takes us to a world in which everyone is intensely human and vulnerable, whether they are roaming the climate-controlled megamalls of Manila or the desolate streets of a Midwest town…With the precision of a microsurgeon, Stapleton dissects the subtle frustrations of the heart, picking out details and tell-tale cracks that make life seem so fragile, and therefore dear. The stories in The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing are an unflinching look into lives of quiet desperation, and an auspicious debut for its young author. —Eric Gamalinda, editor, Flippin’: Filipinos on America
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781879960541 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Aunt Lute Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/1998 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 196 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
THE LOWEST BLUE FLAME BEFORE NOTHING
LOURDES AND LUZ would have a field day with the weight categories. Light-on-the-heavy-side-not-too-much-mayo-weight. Itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-weight. Fly-in-the-buttermilk-weight. Fly-in-the-face-of-convention-weight. Baton-weight. Bataan-weight. Needle-in-a-haystack-weight. Not-at-all-weight. Sneeze-weight. Lourdes, whose sophomore algebra was fresh in her memory, observed that light heavyweight must be like x + -x and means you weigh zero, and that must be the lightest category of all. They went on into equations: what is junior dust-under-the-couch-weight minus wet-towel-weight? That's negative, clearly, Luz said. Okay, Lourdes said, Miss Know-it-all—toe-nail-clipping-weight by passing-wind. Disgusting, Luz said, and then they stopped, grinning. They bordered on ruining it by going on too long.
And later again, Lourdes would say that that was the turning point. Lourdes would say that that was the day which destroyed Dulce. They had lost her once and for all. Luz, who was the eldest and held greater strength of conviction, would say that it was just a coincidence, that that day, the day Dulce met Zuke the boxer, was only a normal teen-age act of rebellion. She would argue that she herself had done the same thing at thirteen, the night she drank three beers at Maria Luna Saguid's house. Testing limits, Luz said. You, Lourdes, she said—for a week straight you skipped ballet and made out with the Impala. Where did he get that damn Impala? I never made out with him, Lourdes said. We only drove around and heldhands and they had money because his father had been a diplomat.
Lourdes begged to differ. Lourdes, who knew deep down inside that she was right but had trouble arguing with her elder sister, said that the day they met Zuke was a foreshadowing, a clear sign of things to come. And if they—the women, the two older and wiser sisters and their mother—if they had knocked some sense into Dulce back then, the later tragedy would have never arisen.
No, Luz said, the first time was normal—later it was crazy. Later, they had already lost her.
Beg-to-differ-weight. Shadow-on-a-cloudy-day.
Dulce—she woke that morning into a stillness all her own. Before she even opened her eyes there was a mint flavor, and her breathing stung slightly, a good cold sting, balm. From the moment she woke, she longed to be outside so her skin could drink the sun. She was euphoric. She was fifteen. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed and blinked the sleep from her eyes. Lourdes lay in the twin bed across the room. Later, the three sisters would go to the international festival at the park.
For Lourdes, that day had been something else entirely. What she tasted was not something you're supposed to taste. Slightly poison. Like lingering paint on your hands, or soap. She knew from the start that it would simply be a day to endure. She couldn't lay her finger on it but it was everything. She heard the morning noises of the house—the pipes with their refusal of rhythm, her father urinating in the bathroom, the obscene swallow of the toilet. Her scalp itched. Her white bras were all dingy and full of lint. There was certainly a pea in the mattress, boy.
Lourdes tried to keep it to herself, noticing that Dulce was ecstatic, that Dulce carried the expression of a child about to break into run. Lourdes knew instinctively that Luz and Dulce would not tolerate her foul mood, would mock and further irritate her. And so she was silent. And so she didn't complain when Dulce turned the radio to a station that didn't come in clearly, when she let the static burn and sizzle through to ruin a beautiful song.
Dulce with her incomprehensible outburst of affection. She kissed her parents and sisters. She grabbed their hands and danced while the others were still staring with weariness.
Dulce pinched her shoulder blades back and put on her most womanly dress, a bright yellow thing that fell just over her knees. She looked curvier.
She was, indeed, the curvy one. Dulce was thick and brown, like her mother's side. Luz and Lourdes had the look of Chinese girls, like their father, slender and yellow. Dulce was the dark one. Her hair was just a bit coarse. For this reason she was their mother's baby, the island child.
Seemed Baning spent all her daughters' young years braiding Dulce's hair at the kitchen table. Braiding and unbraiding, braiding and unbraiding toward an absurd perfection. The other two were jealous and watched huddled from the bottom of the stairs.
That day Luz and Dulce couldn't stop touching each other, and Lourdes walked briskly ahead. The two linked arms. They pressed their cheeks together. Baning had given them two dollars a piece. They were to be home by nightfall.
Dulce imitated Lourdes' walk. She always walked like a dancer. Feet turned permanently out into second position. One arm squeezing a bulky bag against her side, one arm arranged with delicacy—that slightly extended pointer finger, that curve of the wrist. Luz whispered loudly enough to be overheard, "You'd think that maybe one day she would leave the house without her hair in a bun."
Dulce did her own big clunky imitation of a pirouette. Luz's was closer, being that she was slight-framed like a ballerina, being that her body worked that way. They asked if Lourdes would like to go back and get her tutu.
The sun was raging, interrogating, but there was a breeze strong enough to bring relief, goose pimples. The wind lifted Dulce's skirt slightly, and she liked it. Lourdes' skirt was a narrow fit, and Luz's defied gravity and stayed put. Dulce turned her face up and opened her mouth, as if there were a sweet rain. Lourdes looked for shade. She would walk swiftly ahead with her out-turned feet and then pause to wait under an awning for the other two. And then she'd do it again.
Their mother had packed them a bag and Lourdes had it squeezed under an elbow. Baning had insisted on giving them six large pork buns, each wrapped in aluminum foil. There would be food at the fair, but Baning insisted. She gave them a thermos of Kool-Aid. Lourdes could hear it sloshing as she stepped. They stopped in a little deli for candy. Lourdes' bag was bulky enough that when she turned, unconscious of her girth, things behind her got knocked off the shelves, and when she turned to eye the tumbling cans, boxes fell. Luz and Dulce snorted into their fists.
Lourdes reminded herself that sometimes you feel like this. That sometimes you have moods where little things mean more than they would on other days. Her headache was a barely perceptible hum, the lowest blue flame before nothing. She wanted to grab Luz by the hair, not Dulce, but Luz. Luz could so easily gather Dulce against Lourdes. It was Dulce and Lourdes who shared a room. Lourdes who spooned Dulce when she cried.
Lourdes was seventeen and Luz was one year older.
Lourdes grew increasingly resentful that she was burdened with the heavy bag while the other two skipped and fell over each other. "You take it," she said, holding it at arm's length to Luz. Luz said no way, José, and then Lourdes looked to Dulce. She would have said please to Dulce, but Dulce looked to Luz.
Lourdes grumbled. There was the sloshing of the Kool-Aid and the embarrassing scent of the pork. She was a block ahead of the other two anyway when she paused to open the thermos. "Do you want any?" she asked with a seriousness that made the other two giggle. Luz shook her head with a choreographed stiffness. Lourdes poured the sugary purple slowly on the edge of the sidewalk as she walked. She tried to match the stream with the crack. When she was done, she threw the pork buns back at her sisters—the aluminum foil was hot by now, and they threw a couple back again and Lourdes didn't laugh but she sighed.
By the time they entered the park, the three were walking together. It was overwhelmingly crowded. Luz said it was a fire hazard. It was like registration, she told Lourdes, who would be registering for the first time that fall.
Lourdes wanted to go home immediately. It stunk in a gross human way. Dulce said they should go back and get the pork buns off the sidewalk and sell them for a dime a piece. Luz said it would be a nickel to lick the Kool-Aid off the cement. They bought lemonades and intricate clay dragons on sticks from a Chinese lady. Most of their money was gone. They ran into their mother's best friend's daughter and walked with her a while, until she took off with her boyfriend. A white girl wasn't looking and almost dropped ice cream on Dulce. Dulce cursed her with the dragon and then imitated her. They stood next to a bench waiting for a mother to take her children and leave. Dulce called them brats and waved her monster on a stick when the woman wasn't looking. The lady finally got up and the girls collapsed against each other and fanned pamphlets over their faces.
There were boys on fences. There were boys on fences all over the park, in pairs and threesomes and ten at a time. Lourdes and Luz weren't particularly fond of these young men, but Dulce, she couldn't help herself. Dulce had lingered a few steps behind whenever her sisters got distracted. Her spine curved up. She smiled back at the hissing calling boys and then ran with her secret naughtiness back in step with the other two.
There were two particular boys not far from where the sisters fell into each other on the bench. They were facing them from the other side of the fountain. The fountain blocked half of the tall skinny one but his friend was clearly in view. One was tall and skinny with glasses, clearly a sissy, and the other was short and also thin, but very muscular. The short one wore a T-shirt fit to burst and a loose pair of chinos. He had a lot of energy. He hopped up on the fence and then down, up on the fence and then down. He gesticulated to his friend and turned to watch girls pass this way and that. The tall one stayed on the fence. They were Mexicans. The short one had a buzz cut and thick undefined features, as if his face were melting. The tall one's bangs rolled over in front and were greasy.
It was obvious that the short one would do the talking. They were the kind of friends where the one would do the talking while the other stuffed his fists in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders, and hovered awkwardly. The tall one would stand back a bit, nod at what the other one said, and blush when the short one embarrassed him.
Dulce liked the short one. He had big, rich brown eyes, darker than his hair. His eyes were big enough that she could see them from her side of the fountain. She liked the way he made fists loosely at his side, how quickly he turned from one direction to another.
The short one said something that made three girls laugh. Three Mexican girls suddenly bent a bit and one with a ponytail looked back. The girls kept walking, and the short boy turned to his friend on the fence and raised his hands for a little victory pose. Dulce kept watching until he glanced in her direction and then she looked quickly away.
He called across to her in Spanish. Dulce looked one way and then the other to make sure it was meant for her. "What?" she called back, scootching forward and upsetting the way her sisters were balanced against her. He called again and she yelled back that she didn't speak Spanish. Luz and Lourdes looked to each other. He called back in English and asked her her name. Luz yelled, "She doesn't speak English," and broke herself up, but Dulce yelled, "Dulce," and grinned.
The new friend turned for a moment to confer with the tall one. Everything that short one did was exaggerated. When he nodded it was meant to be seen for blocks, as when he shrugged or waved his hand in disagreement.
What the hell are you doing? Lourdes said through her teeth, but Dulce sat where she was scootched, waiting, and ignored her.
The tall one got off the fence and arranged himself against it. He leaned where he had been sitting with his elbows slung back and one foot crossed over the other. The short one gestured to Dulce, come here, come here, with big arcs of his hand, and Dulce stood and smoothed her skirt over her ass.
What the hell are you doing? Lourdes said again, but Dulce sashayed away.
Luz looked to Lourdes: "We shouldn't let her go by herself."
"We shouldn't let her go at all."
"So go grab her by the scruff of the neck."
"Go with her."
"You go talk to those hoodlums."
They watched for a moment as Dulce swayed back and forth like a four-year-old with her thumb in her mouth. Then they slowly went to join them. As they got closer it became apparent that something was very wrong with the short one's face. It was thickened and leathery and his nose was on crooked. His eyes were fine, but just the eyes, not the lids. The lids were as puffy as an old man's. It was like a doe behind a mask.
"I was just telling Dulce here," the boy told the older sisters, "I used to know some Filipinos and they was good people."
Luz and Lourdes stood close enough together and far enough away to speak under their breath without being heard by the others.
"And then you killed them?" Luz whispered but she nodded appreciatively in Zuke's direction.
"He ate them like the Jolly Green Giant." This was Lourdes.
"The jolly brown dwarf."
Zuke was indeed a very small person, smaller than Dulce, certainly, who stood out in the middle, giggling an octave higher than her sisters had ever heard, with her butt up in the air. Dulce with her thick calves, her solid limbs. The boy was just as short and downright skinny, but with these muscles tacked on. Each arm swelled out at the biceps, a snake with prey in its endless throat.
"My name is Zuke." He put his hand to the side of his mouth like he was calling across a canyon, mocking Lourdes and Luz for standing so far away. "This is my cousin, Rudy." He pointed to the tall one who rearranged himself against the fence.
Luz nodded with an enforced friendliness, as if hand were too far for grasping, like peace be with you from a few pews away. Lourdes smiled, but her top lip inched up in the middle. They didn't return his gesture. They didn't mention their names.
"Those are my sisters," Dulce said, this too with bubbles. "Lourdes and Luz." And Zuke said he never would have guessed, no, for real, that the two looked alike, but not Dulce.
There came a moment of silence. There came a moment of heat, no wind to break that unforgiving sun. Rudy pulled his shirt away from his arm pits and readjusted his glasses.
"Gee, it's hot," Dulce gushed, waving the bottom of her yellow dress around.
"Yeah," Zuke said. "I have to be careful, with the heat, you know. I have to be careful with my health, cuz I'm a athlete. I'm a boxer."
Dulce visibly gasped. She bounced up on her heels.
"Yeah, I'm a bantamweight. Rudy here, he's a junior welterweight but he don't fight so that's okay. What are you?" he asked Dulce.
Dulce: I don't know gush, gush, giggle giggle
He: You look like … {Looks her up and down. The sisters lean forward, mouths open in disbelief, then quickly sneer ...} maybe a featherweight. No offense but that's more than me.
She: {Hands on hips, runs the scales in laughter}
He: Or, maybe a junior. Let's see. {Walks toward her with his arms spread, as if to grab her by the middle and lift}
The sisters moved forward. The sisters, linked at the arm as one unit, took a step in, and Zuke must have seen it out of the corner of his eye, because he did not pick up Dulce by the middle. Dulce swayed this way and that.
Lourdes wanted to mash that mashed face. "We should go home," she called to Dulce, who ignored her.
"Look," Zuke said. "I'll teach you: heavyweight, cruiserweight, light heavyweight, super middleweight ..." Dulce repeated and uncurled a finger for each category.
The breeze disappeared again. The sun made them moist, made them both squint and shade their eyes. Luz took a handkerchief from Lourdes' bag and mopped her brow. Lourdes fell to dreaming, awake, in the heat. In the dream she was dancing. There was a recital in which Lourdes had a cramp. It was the kind of thing, had it been in class, the instructor would have run to her with concern. Or the girl next to her would have known, would have grabbed Lourdes' calf and started kneading. Because they all know what it feels like when your muscles betray you. When that long thin muscle becomes a dense sphere, a filled rubber ball, an anvil.
But it was a recital. If you had looked closely, if you had known what you were looking for, you could have seen it, one smooth curving muscle and one sudden, relentless round fruit. Lourdes finished. She flexed her foot once but that was her only attempt at relief, her only break. It was a minute or two. She completed the pas de béret, the turn section, and the grand jeté. She finished on one knee. And when it was over, she sobbed backstage and clutched first her friend Angie and then Miss Ruth, as they rubbed the stubborn mass.
"How long was it like this?" Angie asked, and Lourdes said the last half, and Angie said Lourdes was a heroine. They were still clapping out front and it was Lourdes' glory, and Miss Ruth told not only Lourdes' class, but all the classes except the littlest girls, who might have been frightened, how very brave Lourdes had been.
Luz put her chin on Lourdes' shoulder and woke the younger from her musings. Luz looked for Lourdes' eyes so they could stand in judgment together. Zuke was shadowboxing. Zuke was a hero too. He said Ima buy a Lamborghini. Pow. Boom. Ima buy my mother a fur coat. Pow. Pow. Whatchyou want Grandma? Whatchyouwant Sinbad? Aside: That's my trainer. Dulce fluttered. Whatchyou want Dulce? He winked at her and paused, posing with his fists up. Huh? What you want? Chanel Number Five? Shoes?
Luz and Lourdes had had enough and instinctively moved together to take their sister lightly by the elbow. Dulce shook them off. Zuke went on, he told Dulce how there was this fighter, he was famous, you never heard of him? He's Puerto Rican. His wife had a shoe collection and she would put sequins on them. That was what she liked to do, glue those little sparkly things ...
Rudy had been staring off somewhere else for a long time. He seemed an ally to the older girls. The whole thing made him uncomfortable. Luz and Lourdes each took an arm and tried to gently turn their sister. The grief stricken mother at the coffin, she didn't know her own mind and should be treated gently yet firmly. Dulce yanked her arms from their touchings.
The breeze came back, stronger yet, lifting Dulce's hair to black flames, her skirt. They all shivered. Zuke looked down at Dulce's legs. Lourdes bared her teeth. "Dulce it is time for us to go home right now." Dulce looked at her watch, said no, it's not, and made it clear that her sister was lying. Zuke started talking faster. He seemed to feel that if no one else could get a word in edgewise, they wouldn't be able to end the conversation. The girls stepped back and he stepped forward, reaching out and over with that babble—one time there was a fighter and that guy was already twenty-three and Zuke himself is only seventeen and he annihilated that old man how old are you Dulce ... but he talked right over her answer. Let me guess. Oh I'm right—I figured. You could be older though, you got that sophisticated look, but I guessed ... There was something panicked in his talking, and it gave both Luz and Lourdes the creeps.
Lourdes made Dulce turn to her. She didn't care if it was rude. "We are going home."
"No."
And then Zuke said, let me buy y'all some Italian ice. You girls want some Italian ice? And Lourdes said no, we're going home.
Dulce set her jaw. "Excuse me one second, Zuke," she said, with her shoulders up around her ears and her spine curlingcurling. She, Dulce, that little girl, grabbed her sisters by the elbows and pulled them aside.
"I am going to get Italian ice. I don't care what you do."
"No."
"How are you going to stop me?"
"I'll beat you right here, I swear to god." This was Lourdes.
"Go ahead."
"Dulce, are you crazy? Look at him." This was Lourdes again. Dulce looked over and beamed.
"He looks like an assassin," said Lourdes.
"He's ugly," Luz said.
Dulce's head was shaking something Lourdes had never seen before. She had never seen Dulce so stubborn. She would not admit the possibility of anything else.
"Beat me."
"Ma will beat you when you get home."
"What are you going to tell her? I had Italian ice? She's going to beat me for Italian ice?"
"I will tell her." This was still Lourdes, and even Luz was shocked by the proposal of tattling. They were way beyond the years of tattling.
"Do what you want. Go home and tell Ma, or beat me right here, like you could, but I am going to get Italian ice with Zuke. You can come if you want." She walked back to rejoin he who was now her date.
Lourdes' eyes darted all over Luz's face. Luz should have done something. Luz was the oldest. Dulce would have listened to Luz. "We have to go with her," Lourdes said. She was about to cry. Luz scrunched up her eyes with an accusation of insanity. Lourdes' desperation was more ridiculous than the whole ridiculous situation. Too much passion for this dumb day.
Luz thought of who might see her. She thought of a boy she liked from last year's biology and she thought of Jenny who was always looking for a good reason to say horrible things. Luz did not want to be seen with that ugly hoodlum. They argued, but it didn't matter: Dulce went for the ice.
"It's just over there," she called as she walked with Zuke and Rudy. It made Lourdes feel better that Rudy went too, and she could see the cart from where they stood.
Zuke didn't touch her. He turned back to wave at Dulce's sisters.
And it wasn't very long that Lourdes took her eyes off of Dulce. It was just long enough to threaten Luz with telling their mother and complain that Luz could have stopped the whole thing, and long enough for Luz to say Lourdes was a big baby and that everyone was acting crazy. It couldn't have been more than a moment but there was Rudy, the embarrassed messenger, talking without looking up, his black glasses sliding down his damp face. "Your sister said she'll be home before dark." And Dulce was nowhere in sight.
The breeze disappeared.
The seething sun.
Lourdes took the leadership as they searched, shading their eyes. This was the first time Luz didn't behave as the eldest; it had been stripped of her. Lourdes just walked where she would, knowing Luz would fall in beside her. Knowing Luz should have done right earlier, if she was going to do right. They combed the park. They chased a yellow dress, and it was a Filipino girl too, until the wrong gesture cleared things up. You would know from a distance your own sister's vocabulary of gesture. You would know her pacing. They saw Rudy again, shuffling with his fists in his pockets, and he promised to look too, to tell Dulce to wait by the fountain, but Lourdes didn't believe him. They spoke to a kid or two from the neighborhood, but no one had seen a sign of Dulce. Lourdes walked around front of a group to get a look at a short Mexican in chinos and a T-shirt. She walked around to look him full in the face and the guy's girlfriend asked her what she was doing. She kept moving. They split up and met back at the fountain, and then Luz said, look we have to go home. If she gets home before us we'll really be in for it.
Luz said we'll tell Ma she went off with Linda. This was their mom's best friend's daughter. And we'll call Linda and tell her what to say too. No way, José, Lourdes said. I am going to tell Ma the truth. I don't care what you say. Dulce can't act like this. She has to learn.
They walked home with their defiant jaws. Nervous and mad at each other. Lourdes' headache pulsed. She had to stop and close her eyes to cool it. They walked by the Chinese food place, where an n had fallen off so that the sign read "Chinatow." Luz nudged Lourdes to point it out and Lourdes said so what. Then Luz said, "light-on-the-heavy-side-not-too-much-mayo-weight, itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-weight." And Lourdes couldn't resist and said, "fly-in-the-buttermilk-weight, fly-in-the-face-of-convention." And then she laughed so hard she forgot her heated brain until they got very close to home and grew at first quiet and then argued again about what to tell their mother.
Lourdes with her poise. Her placing one foot, then the other, on the stoop, the stairs. The toe before the heel. The precision of her fingers on the banister, the doorknob, her nimble darting fingers. Everything always placed, never put. Lourdes looked very much like Luz, a version wound up taller with posture, but Lourdes' eyes were all her own. Nothing like the rest of her family, with their eyes open and receiving, their come-what-may eyes. Lourdes' eyes were always planning, narrowing, focused.
Luz knocked. Lourdes' stomach surged. They would all be in trouble but she would take responsibility. Lourdes' prepared herself. She stood up, up. Baning answered the door and smiled. The two came in, and Baning looked out in the hallway for the third. Before she could ask, Lourdes blurted out, "Ma, Dulce went to get Italian ice with a boy she just met and never came back."
Baning's expression twisted. This would have to be repeated.
Luz said, "Oh, Ma, she just went with Linda and Linda's boyfriend and a friend of his. They promised to be home before dark."
Lourdes felt she had been generous because she did not say that the boy was a mash-faced Mexican boxer. Now if she told, she would make two of them liars. It would be two against one, and Luz and Dulce would be ganged up against her for months. She would have to sleep in the room with Dulce, who would be not speaking to her. Dulce with her broad back turned, with silence to Lourdes' stories. Luz should be the wise one. Luz should know right and save Dulce. Lourdes looked to her sister, whose expression of defiance was only meant for her. Luz's face was so subtle Baning would never see. Luz would make Lourdes look crazy to save her own ass.
Baning sighed and said nothing. Luz went to the corner store to call Linda from a public phone and then waited on the stoop for Dulce as long as she could, until their mother called dinner. Lourdes clutched a pillow in her bedroom, plotting how to teach Dulce. None of her ideas would take hold. Usually, answers came to Lourdes and stayed. Usually, she would think for a moment and she would know. But on this day, she would decide and then a moment later forget what the decision had been. She was malfunctioning, dizzy. She had to save Dulce, but ... Luz was bullying her, but ... The phone. The truth.
It was dusk when they ate. It was almost dark. Usually, Lourdes ate so neatly. Usually, Lourdes was the one who cut small squares of her chicken, or only ate so many noodles, and turned the fork over, back up, place each small portion in her mouth and wipe with the napkin from her lap. She ate more than anybody and took her time doing so. But on this night she didn't eat. Lourdes basically stirred her food. And when the doorknob turned, Luz, thinking ahead, before Dulce even shut the door behind her, Luz, with her mouth full of noodles said, "Did you have a nice time with Linda and her boyfriend and that friend of his?" her stern, warning eyes. Baning said she was a bit late. Was she hungry? No, Dulce wasn't hungry and she swooned past them into her bedroom and swooned onto her bed so that she could stare at the ceiling and swoon.
There is a certain way that aunts raise their nieces and nephews. They love them for their missing sister, the dead, ill, or indifferent. A double love. Love for a ghost and then some. With weariness and heartbreak and a desire to stave off the disaster they could not stave before. Lourdes, years later, she would raise Dulce's son with a bit of restrained madness. She would be afraid to touch him.
Table of Contents
| The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing | 1 |
| Motherlove | 17 |
| No Such Absolute | 42 |
| The Middle of October | 52 |
| Promise | 63 |
| Thirty Seconds | 76 |
| Delicious | 87 |
| So Much | 98 |
| The Next Place | 106 |
| The Great Artist | 111 |
| Embouchure | 125 |
| Pure Impending Glory | 141 |
What People are Saying About This
A gutsy, emotionally astute collection of stories that walks the reader over the hot coals of unnamed desire. -- (Ginu Kamani, author of Junglee Girl)