Nieta / Neyta
In the elevator of her boyfriend’s apartment building, which used to be a pencil factory but now housed a loose cult of gentrifiers and carceral feminists, Gisselle coughed up a ladybug.
She took her hand away from her mouth and looked down at it, at the ladybug struggling to stay alive, surrounded by a dark pink lipstick mark, its legs twitching against the skin of her palm, its blood orange wings wet with her spit. It looked like a pomegranate seed, she thought, or a rosary bead.
With her free hand, Gisselle dug into her purse until she found the empty Altoids tin where she kept a single spool of black thread, with needles and buttons varying in size littered around it. She opened the tin and used the corner rim to scoop the ladybug up and off her. Then she closed the lid and returned it to her bag.
When the elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, Gisselle’s boyfriend was already waiting for her. He looked up from his phone and smiled at her with that amused smile of his, as if she had just done something endearing, or as if he were picturing her naked. She stepped off the elevator and he kissed her, his phone still in his hand as he grabbed her face, knocking against her jaw.
“God, I missed you,” he said. He put an arm around Gisselle’s shoulders and began leading her towards his apartment. “You look different. Well, not different, but—you look more like you did when we first met. Does that make sense? Forget it. Ignore me. How was your trip?”
“Other than freezing my ass off?” She expected him to laugh with her, but he just looked on ahead, waited for her to say something else. “Yeah, no, it was good.”
A month earlier, Gisselle’s mother had surprised her with an all-expenses-paid trip to Iceland, where they’d stayed at a newly opened spa resort overlooking Eldhraun, a lava field overrun by moss and snow. The resort’s exterior was made entirely of two-way mirrors so that, from the outside, it was easily mistaken for part of the scenery. During their stay, Gisselle would often wonder what the implications of this were: living, if only temporarily, inside an optical illusion. Her mother had said that there was no point in getting away if people could find where you’d gone.
Gisselle’s boyfriend entered the apartment ahead of her and took off his shoes in the entryway. Gisselle did the same. The apartment had changed in the month since she’d last seen it: the walls were painted a darker shade of green, there was a new rug in the living room, and the TV had grown by several inches.
“Want something to drink? Or food, maybe?” he asked. “We could order pizza.”
“Just water for now. Thanks.”
Gisselle sat down on the couch and tried to remember the spa doctor’s instructions: which foods and drinks she needed to avoid, which strenuous activities she could still participate in. What had he told her before she signed the consent forms? Why hadn’t she asked for copies?
Her boyfriend returned from the kitchen with a can of beer in one hand and a glass of water in the other. As he handed her the glass, Gisselle realized that she hadn’t missed him as much as he’d missed her. Still, she wanted him, in that touch-starved way she always seemed to want him now, a year into their relationship: like he was no longer a person to her but a body that just so happened to have a soul attached to it—not the other way around, like she’d grown up believing.
It was bodies, not souls, that brought people together, she told herself. Bodies, not souls, that needed saving. Wasn’t that why her mother had wanted them to go to Iceland? Only she didn’t feel saved, the way her mother had said she would; she felt like she had bought herself a very limited amount of time.
Gisselle set her glass on the coffee table and took the beer from her boyfriend’s hands to do the same. When she got on his lap to kiss him, he laughed into her lips and clumsily groped at her chest.
“You feel lighter,” he said, flipping Gisselle onto her back and getting on top of her.
“You probably just forgot what I feel like.”
He started to undo his belt, then paused to bend down and kiss her. “I’d never.”
The doctor explained the procedure to Gisselle in a thick Icelandic accent.
His office was on the top floor of the resort, which was also where guests were sent to recover from their procedures. All of the walls were soundproof, the floors were heated, and nurses were on call 24/7. Gisselle sat across from him in a plush blue chair shaped like a seashell. There were plants everywhere, some more alive than others.
“You are familiar with gastric balloons, yes?” the doctor asked. Gisselle nodded. “Is like that.”
On a computer screen next to him, there was an animation of a stomach being probed by a clear tube alongside an endoscope. At the end of the tube, Gisselle saw what looked like a condom being inflated to nearly the exact size and shape of the stomach. The doctor watched her watching. She leaned in and pointed at the video, which had reset to its original frame.
“What is this?”
“Silicone. Like breast implant,” the doctor said. “We inflate once is inside.”
“And then?”
“Then we fill it.”
Gisselle looked over at her mother, who sat in a wheelchair off to the side, flipping through a catalog that detailed all of the procedures offered by the resort. Her mother had had hers that morning, and she was no doubt high on painkillers, but she had insisted on joining Gisselle for her consultation anyway.
“The way it works,” the doctor continued, “is that is bigger than regular gastric balloon. You see, we design to look like stomach, yes? Enough space on sides for liquids to get through, but not enough space to move around. Then, opening at top for food. Like door. Only opens when enough food hits it. Understand?”
“Yes, but—”
“Ay, por favor, just do it,” Gisselle’s mother interrupted. “You don’t even have to go under for it.”
“I just want to get all the information.”
“If you worry about the ladybugs—no, is safe, I promise you,” the doctor said. “They live inside the balloon, yes? They eat for you. No way for them to get out.”
Gisselle woke to the sound of her boyfriend singing a Starship song off-key in the shower.
She was still on the couch, a crocheted blanket pulled taut over her head. Through the holes in the stitching, she could see the ceiling fan whirring above her. At its center was a flickering lightbulb, like a sun cut off by passing clouds. Gisselle shut her eyes and waited for her boyfriend to finish his song.
They’d made plans to grab brunch with some of her boyfriend’s friends, Charlotte and Travis, another couple who lived in the building and who worked for a non-profit that built riverfront housing communities for stray cats. Once, Gisselle had asked them why they didn’t build housing for people instead, to which Charlotte responded, “Well, that’s different, cats don’t choose to be homeless.”
Gisselle sat up. She didn’t know why she spent time with these people, except maybe to punish herself for staying in the city, even after all her friends and family had been forced out. She felt like she had chosen a side, despite knowing that it wasn’t the sides that had changed, just the people allowed on them.
Her boyfriend came out of the bathroom already dressed, his hair dripping onto his shirt. He walked over to her and gave her a kiss on the top of her head, then dropped down on the couch beside her.
“So tell me more about this resort,” he said.
Gisselle reached for the glass of water she’d left on the coffee table the night before. When she took a sip, it tasted like soap, and when she burped, she half-expected bubbles to come floating out of her mouth.
“It looked like something out of a Bond movie. I don’t know. I have nothing to compare it to,” Gisselle said. “Honestly? It doesn’t even feel like it was me who went. I mean, I’d never even left the East Coast before this, and there I was at some bougie spa resort in Iceland with all these—”
Gisselle swallowed the end of her sentence. She looked at her boyfriend, debating whether finishing her thought was worth the fight it might cause. She decided it wasn’t. “Rich people. You know?”
He put an arm around her. “Hey, you deserved to be there just as much as they did. Plus, doesn’t it feel good to know that there’s more for you out there than this shitshow of a city?”
Gisselle shrugged off his arm and stood up. She felt lightheaded and her knees buckled slightly beneath her. She waited for her vision to come back into focus before she said, “It’s not a shitshow.”
Her boyfriend rolled his eyes and laughed. “Whatever you say.”
“I’m serious.”
Gisselle looked at her boyfriend and waited for his expression to change, for an apology, but he kept laughing and shaking his head at her. There must have been a word for violence like this, so casual and contagious, but if there was, she didn’t know it.
“Come on, go brush your teeth and let’s go,” he said. “I don’t want to be late for brunch.”
Gisselle watched as her boyfriend rose from the couch and walked past her to the kitchen, leaving behind a trail of water droplets on the floor that she knew he wouldn’t clean. He opened a cabinet and took out a bag of chips, started eating them by the handful. She wondered what it must be like to have an appetite like his, big enough to consume a city, to pick all the meat off its bones and suck at the marrow, to lick the plate clean, only to turn around and complain that the portion was not enough.
The night before the procedure, Gisselle tucked her mother into bed. Visiting hours were over and she needed to return to their suite on the first floor. She studied her mother’s face, wrapped in bandages, and adjusted the neck pillow a nurse had given her to keep her head in place while she slept.
The room smelled like cinnamon gum and bleach. The blackout curtains, despite being pulled down all the way, didn’t cover the full length of the windows, and Gisselle watched as pair after pair of impeccably white Crocs came and went as nurses scurried past her mother’s room.
“You stopped wearing your retainer,” Gisselle’s mother said, still hopped up on painkillers.
Gisselle laughed. It amused her to see her mother like this. “What?”
“After you got your braces off. You only wore your retainer for a few months and then you stopped. Now your teeth are all crooked again. All that money gone to waste. Tanto dolor para nada.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Mami. Tell me in the morning.”
When Gisselle turned to leave, her mother grabbed her by the wrist with a bandaged hand. It hurt both of them in different ways and for different reasons.
“Don’t do the same thing this time, beba. Whatever the doctor tells you to do, you do it. ¿Entiendes?” She said all of this with her eyes closed, with lips that looked to Gisselle like smashed cherries. As she began to doze off, Gisselle’s mother said, “When we get back home, they won’t even recognize us.”
“You make it seem like they recognize us now.”
“¿En serio? Of course they do. Me more than you.” She let out a long yawn. “That’s why you’ve been able to stay. And if you want to keep staying…well, this is one way to do it, I think.”
Gisselle was silent for a few moments. She stayed like that, standing in the almost-dark, heat rising from the floor. She could feel her feet starting to sweat. She listened to her own breath, soft and shaky.
“What are the other ways?” Gisselle asked finally, but her mother was already asleep.
When Gisselle arrived back at the suite, she went straight to the bathroom to shower. While she waited for the water to heat up, she stared at herself in the mirror and thought about what it might mean for her to become unrecognizable. To return to an old place in a new body, one that required less space, one that she could origami herself into, until it no longer resembled what it once was.
Until, like the city itself, it looked like something else entirely.
At brunch, Charlotte tried to explain her new diet to Gisselle.
“Basically, I just drink Pedialyte and whole milk,” she said between sips of her mimosa. “Except today. Today I’m cheating. Wait. Are you on a new diet or something? You look really good, bitch.”
Charlotte had a habit of calling everyone she knew bitch in an aggressively overfamiliar way that had made Gisselle instantly dislike her when they first met. Even now, after knowing her for a year, it still made Gisselle cringe, especially when she witnessed her doing it to strangers. She didn’t understand how Charlotte could assume closeness with someone like that, as if bonds between people were automatic and not earned.
“No, no diet. I just—”
“Gisselle just got back from this new spa in Iceland,” Gisselle’s boyfriend interrupted. He was three beers deep and wouldn’t stop squeezing her thigh underneath the table. “Isn’t she glowing?”
“No fucking way,” Charlotte said. “I think I’ve heard of that place. Didn’t Goop do a piece on it?”
“I’m not sure. My mom planned everything.”
“Iceland?” Travis snorted. “No wonder you lost weight. I’ve heard the food is atrocious.”
“Yeah, I didn’t really eat much while I was there.”
“Well, it was worth it. I can’t get over how good you look,” Charlotte said.
Gisselle’s boyfriend excused himself to the bathroom, leaving her alone with Charlotte and Travis. She looked around the room and tried to find their waitress in the crowd. If their food came right now, she thought, they wouldn’t have to speak. Gisselle spotted her at the bar, leaning in to whisper something to the bartender. It felt like too intimate of a moment for Gisselle to witness, so she turned away.
The restaurant was designed to look like a library, complete with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and drinks named after famous authors, but Gisselle could only see it as what it had been when she was a child: a botánica owned by two young Puerto Rican women, neither of whom would ever be famous enough to have drinks named after them. Gisselle would pass the botánica every day on her walk back home from her middle school, and just as her abuela had taught her to do, she would make the sign of the cross and recite the Lord’s Prayer as she did. Sometimes, if she was feeling especially pious, she would cross the street.
Once, on a dare, she and her best friend Mari had walked into the store while the rest of their group stayed behind, waiting for something haunted to happen. Inside, it smelled like incense and bacalao. The foyer was empty except for a velvet chaise and an altar filled with unlit votive candles and various statuettes. The girls had to walk through a beaded curtain to get to the main part of the store, where the women were sitting behind the counter, caught up in conversation, their voices sharp with Bushwick accents. They stood up when Gisselle and Mari walked in, adjusted their tank tops by the straps. When the women smiled at them, Gisselle instantly relaxed, while Mari started sweating through her polo. They were everything Gisselle’s mother had warned her against becoming, with their short shirts and pierced belly buttons and brightly painted nails, thick rhinestone crosses resting on their cleavage. They were visible and they didn’t care. Gisselle couldn’t look away, or else she didn’t want to. She wanted to memorize everything about them, to be caught in their orbit, spun dizzy.
“Do you got, um…candles?” Mari asked the women.
“¿Qué es esto?” one of them said, laughing.
Gisselle said nothing. She looked at the shelves to her left, which displayed dozens of glass jars filled with tea leaves, labeled with stickers that explained the properties of each one. When she saw this happening, the second woman walked over and planted herself between Gisselle and the shelves.
“Nenas, as much as we need the business, we can’t be selling you anything,” she said to them. “Come back in a few years when you’re a little older. We’ll teach you everything we know.”
Now Gisselle was older and there was nowhere to come back to, and still so much she needed to learn. She wondered whether the owners of the restaurant had known about the women and their botánica, or if all they knew was that the building had been up for grabs. Had the place smelled like tea leaves when they first arrived? Did they have to walk through the beaded curtains once, too?
Gisselle’s boyfriend returned to the table just as their food arrived. Everyone had ordered burgers except for Gisselle, who always picked the cheapest thing on the menu whenever she went out with them. This time, it was a salad loaded with lox and eggs, the yolks of which were runnier than she normally liked.
“That looks so good,” Charlotte said. “Can I try some?”
She hadn’t even waited for Gisselle to take her first bite before asking. Still, Gisselle pushed the bowl towards Charlotte and smiled. “Of course, bitch.”
As everyone else devoured their food, Gisselle picked at hers until the leaves of spinach looked like they had gone through a shredder. She remembered what the spa doctor had told her about the way she needed to eat following the procedure. She needed to pace herself, he’d said to her, restrain herself. Small sips. Small bites. Sit up straight, stand when possible. Chew for at least a minute before swallowing.
“Just out of curiosity,” Travis said mid-bite, “how did you and your mom afford that spa?”
“Dude,” Gisselle’s boyfriend said, grease and cheese dripping down his chin.
“What? I’m just asking a question.”
Charlotte sucked her teeth, and Gisselle couldn’t figure out whether it was a sign of her disapproval or if she was checking them for spinach.
“Gisselle, you don’t mind, do you?” Travis leaned in. “Just tell me. Was it… Like, did you get some kind of discount because you’re…”
He mouthed a word that wasn’t offensive on its own, but when he added air quotes to it, Gisselle’s face went hot. Then he mouthed two more and did the same.
Gisselle wiped her mouth with her napkin and tried to decide how she wanted to respond to him, to Charlotte, to her own boyfriend’s silence. She could tell them all the truth, but Travis and Charlotte didn’t deserve to know any of it, and she knew this. She knew that she needed to find a lie that they couldn’t turn into tragedy porn or a Facebook post, something that they wouldn’t retell to strangers at their next book club meeting, in between sips of wine and excerpts from American Dirt.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Charlotte said, “but we’re listening.”
Gisselle had never felt more like a spectacle than she did in that moment, in this restaurant with its fairy lights and garlands of fake flowers and leaves looped through the rafters, its overpriced and under-seasoned food. She felt an itch in the back of her throat and took a sip of water to try and get rid of it. When she realized that the sensation was traveling closer to the roof of her mouth, she began to cough, louder and louder until their waitress came with the manager to check on her, the two of them eventually guiding her to the bathroom so as not to disturb the other patrons.
“I’ll leave you to it,” the waitress said.
Gisselle stood in front of the mirror, steadying herself against the freestanding sink. The porcelain was cracked in a way that felt too intentional to be an accident. She cleared her throat, coughed and gagged one more time. When she did, a ladybug landed on the glass in front of her, and another on the soap dispenser. Just like she had in the elevator, Gisselle took the Altoids tin out of her purse and scooped the ladybugs into it, closing it with a snap that echoed briefly in her right ear. Then she rolled up her shirt and looked in the mirror, turning sideways until she found an angle that made her ribs look like the strings of a harp, then like the teeth of a serrated knife.
She wondered if this was what being pregnant felt like: not in looks or weight but in the knowing that there was something inside of you, responding to whatever you gave to it. She pulled her shirt back down and tried to picture all the women she knew who were now somewhere far from her. She thought of Mari, the last to be forced out; she thought of her abuela, the first. What would they think of how apologetic she had become in all her shrinking?
When she returned to the table, Charlotte was crying and Travis had already paid the bill.
On the train the next day, Gisselle read a think piece about the link between food cravings and socioeconomic status while sipping on an overpriced green juice.
The writer used phrases like food desert and poverty meals and made it a point to call out microcelebrities that Gisselle had only heard of in passing. He included an entire section about access, quoting activists and hyperlinking statistics, crafting extended metaphors that didn’t quite land but were close enough to not be edited out. At the end of the article, he included his Venmo for tips, and Gisselle briefly considered donating.
Gisselle was on her way to see her therapist for the first time since she’d gotten back from Iceland. Across from her, a white man watched YouTube videos without headphones. The woman next to him ate a slice of pizza and covered her mouth between bites. A child in a stroller kicked off one of their shoes and a stranger handed it back to the parents, who didn’t say thank you. A few seats over from Gisselle, an older man wearing a yellow guayabera and a Panama hat sat with a conga between his legs, tapping it absentmindedly. When he saw Gisselle looking at him, he smiled, and she smiled back.
“¿La reconoces?” he asked.
Gisselle noticed some of the other passengers lift their heads to watch her interaction with this man, with his deep-set eyes and quick hands, his voice warm and measured. He reminded her of the bus driver she’d had in high school, who used to bring her pilones whenever he came back from visiting Puerto Rico.
She debated whether to respond in English or Spanish. Then: “¿La conga o la canción?”
He laughed. “La cancion.”
“No,” she said. “Pero suena bonita.”
“Gracias, nena.”
Before they could say anything more to each other, the train reached Gisselle’s stop and she stood to exit. As the doors opened, she looked back at the man and wondered where he was headed. If there was still a place in the city where men like him sat around in circles and made music for no one but themselves and their people, where proud women danced in the center of these circles, their feet stomping so hard that as a child Gisselle swore they were responsible for every pothole in her neighborhood—or if this place no longer existed, and he was traveling far to find a new one.
Once off the train, she dumped her green juice in the nearest trash can and exited the station. Out of curiosity, she Googled the author of the article and found that he was the son of a millionaire.
The night before Mari was evicted—for real, this time—she and Gisselle sat on Mari’s stoop sipping coffee, a giant tin of Florecitas between them.
“I know they’re all the same,” Mari said, popping a cookie into her mouth, “but I swear the ones with the yellow icing taste the best.”
It was a week before Gisselle left for Iceland and the block smelled of hookah smoke and pizza, both coming from the hookah lounge across from Mari’s apartment building. Outside the lounge’s parking lot, a fire hydrant sputtered water onto the street, washing away somebody’s chalk art, rivulets of green- and pink-colored water making their way to the sewer. Gisselle hadn’t seen what the chalk art was of, but she tried to imagine the artist on their hands and knees, their body in a kind of surrender—to the art, to the block.
Mari took another cookie and used her front teeth to separate the icing from its base, then put it on her tongue and took a sip of coffee in order to melt it faster. She tossed the plain cookie back in the tin just as Gisselle stuck her hand in and rummaged around for a yellow one.
“I already know you’re gonna roast me for this, but…I actually hate the icing.”
Mari swallowed quickly. “How did I not know this?”
Gisselle shrugged. She twisted off the icing and gave it to Mari before eating the cookie, which, on its own, was just the right amount of sweet.
Mari looked down at the dollop of yellow icing in her hand and bust out laughing. “I’ve known you since we were kids and you wait until my last real night in my city to tell me you don’t know how to eat Florecitas? You’re wrong for that.”
“You just ate the icing and threw the cookie back in the tin!” Gisselle tried and failed to keep a straight face. “Telling me I don’t know how to eat Florecitas. I’m so done with you.”
Mari kept laughing until her laughter devolved into a series of snorts, eventually triggering her smoker’s cough, which she continued to laugh through. “Bitch, I’ve been done with you.”
After a while, their laughter settled. Mari sighed and set her mug on the upside-down terracotta planter behind her that doubled as an ashtray. Gisselle put the lid back on the tin of Florecitas. She thought of her abuela, who reused cookie tins to store needles and spools of thread and buttons, who taught her how to sew with surgeon-like precision. It’d been a year since she moved to Florida with Gisselle’s mother, a year since her mother had lost the house that Gisselle grew up in.
And now Mari was on her way out, too, off to Cleveland to live with the only member of her family she still spoke to: a cousin named Rafael, who hand-rolled cigarettes and taught Spanish at a local charter school, and who for years had tried to convince Mari to use his address to apply to colleges in Ohio. But Mari was loyal to the city—even now, she swore to Gisselle that she’d be back.
Upstairs, everything was boxed up except for the air mattress they would share that night, Mari’s collection of grecas varying in size, and the mugs they’d been drinking out of. Mari had gotten the boxes from an ex-boyfriend who worked at the liquor store down the street and who still—six years after their breakup—slipped her a bottle of Don Q whenever she came in. She’d called that morning to ask Gisselle for help packing the last of her things. When Gisselle had arrived at the apartment, she’d nearly slipped on the sheets of bubble wrap and newspaper that littered the floor, while Mari sat on the fire escape crying.
Then it was hours later, and they were looking out on Mari’s street for what was probably the last time as it existed in that moment: poorly lit and perfect, at least to Gisselle.
“So you excited for this trip?” Mari asked.
“Maybe a little relieved to get away from everything.” Gisselle felt her face get hot when she realized how she must have sounded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“You’re okay. I’m excited for you.”
“You’re not gonna be here when I get back.”
Mari smiled sadly and shook her head. “I’ll be somewhere.”
A week later, Mari would be job hunting in Cleveland and Gisselle would be getting a facial in Iceland. A nurse would tell Gisselle, You are very lucky. Your life is about to change, and Gisselle would think of this moment with Mari, and she would think about all the ways her life had already changed in the past few years: how the prices had gone up at the grocery store, but the produce had never been fresher in her life; how her rent had increased, but there were higher-paying jobs coming to the city. And what was she to do with that? She would think of her mother saying, It’s not all bad, and hate herself for feeling that way, too, sometimes. She would thank the nurse and wonder at all the things her loneliness could make her do.
But she and Mari hadn’t lived any of that yet.
“What happens when I’m pushed out, too?” Gisselle asked Mari.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“You know what this feels like? Remember when we were in fourth grade and we tried using duct tape to wax our arms because Kaitlin Barone called us hairy? And it worked for me but not for you.” She thought about the lengths that people went to in order to be respected. The lengths to which she, herself, was willing to go. She looked down at her arms, at the hair that never grew back the same way. “And now the city is, like, all Kaitlin Barones, you know what I mean?”
Mari reached for her mug and finished what was left in it. “I think I do. But you know it’s not their fault, though, right? The Kaitlin Barones.”
“I know,” Gisselle said. “But I like having someone to blame. Someone that’s right in front of me.”
“She’s not right in front of you, idiota, I am.”
In her therapist’s office, a small room in a townhouse on the other side of the city, Gisselle could only think to talk about that night with Mari.
And afterwards, her therapist stared at her but didn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” Gisselle said. “That was a lot.”
When Gisselle looked around the room, there were ladybugs everywhere: on the lampshades, on the table beside her, on the backs of her hands. But her therapist said nothing about them, so neither did Gisselle.
“It’s okay. Do you feel a little bit better? Do you think you got it all out?”
***
Before the developers convinced her to sign documents she didn’t understand, Gisselle’s abuela lived in a rent-controlled apartment above a laundromat.
It was in this apartment that Gisselle’s abuela taught her lessons in fullness. In growth for growth’s sake. Most nights, and especially after the procedure, this was where Gisselle disappeared to in her dreams.
Together, Gisselle and her abuela would meet in the kitchen to prepare a meal, drowning out the scent of detergent from the laundromat below with the smell of garlic and onions and cilantro picked straight from a neighbor’s fire escape garden. They would take turns peeling yuca and ñame, gutting calabaza and removing the seeds, slicing plátanos for maduros. They filled old containers of Country Crock to the brim with sopa de pollo and arroz con gandules, already anticipating another meal, or else someone in the neighborhood who might need one. One of them would flip the bacalaítos and the other would stir the beans. They would taste, and add, and taste again, until they saw that it was good.
After they prepared the food, Gisselle and her abuela would open all the windows to let the heat out of the apartment. They would listen to old tape recordings of coritos as they set the table and filled each other’s plates, an act of trust that even in dreams Gisselle never believed she had earned.
They didn’t worry about making things look neat or pretty. Everything touched everything. Everything bled into something else, and each bite was a history. And a legacy. And a mercy. In most of these dreams, Gisselle and her abuela wouldn’t even speak. There was no need for them to. This was how they spoke and loved: with burnt tongues, in the brief and fleeting moments between chew and swallow.
Sometimes, after they finished eating, Gisselle would take her abuela’s hands, stiff with arthritis, and kiss her between the knuckles. She would ask for forgiveness. She would ask her to bless her, to curse her, to save her, to forsake her. And still her abuela would claim her, would lift Gisselle’s face and say: Nieta, mi nieta. Tranquila. Come más. And Gisselle would eat for hours, for days, for years, and the city would stay the same, and the developers would never come, and everyone she loved would still be there. Full and fully.