Gramita’s House
Charlie. I devour my tamale—the savory pork oils warm me. I let go of all senses but those of eating—then knees pummel my back, knocking the wind and food from my mouth. “Away! Gah!” Charlie says, pinning me to the floor on my back as I choke up masa.
Children. We’ve been here for years, probably, well after Gramita’s heartbeat faded away in the ambulance. But I’ll always be a child of this house. I wander up its stairs, through its tunnels, and sit or sleep in the rooms that Charlie hasn’t claimed—just to keep moving. The furniture coughs up dust wherever I plop down, and I try to wipe up films of dirt whenever I find a clean spot on a rag. It’s home.
Gramita’s house was once pristine, a neverland. Neighbor kids used to flock over for our toy collection. The poor kids loved our toy cars, and the white kids with money who smelled like Gramita’s tortilla dough first sought our action figures. Hide and seek seemed endless in all the nooks and crannies of Gramita's house—I don’t know how she kept it all clean and tidy. As many as a dozen friends would come over at a time. I’d scamper up two flights of stairs to Gramita’s special room to crouch behind her oak chest holding her quilts from her mother and her mother’s mother. I could barely hear someone like Jenny, the tiny girl from Mrs. Hoover’s class, yowling the numbers up to a count of thirty or forty, then a distant “Ready or not, here I come!”
Even as the walls, sinks, and stoves have gotten grubby, the expanse of this house has always astonished me. Each staircase has grown longer with each family member’s departure.
To the north, Gramita’s Split-Level pancakes stories on top of each other, high. To the south, connected to Gramita's Split-Level by an underground passageway, Grampo's Tower looms, an adobe structure rising from a brick-house base. In Grampo’s Tower are Gramita’s special room and Grampo’s special room, one on top of the other. Above them, there are even more rooms in Grampo’s Tower.
Rarely would a seeker find me there—I was small enough to evade them on my home turf. While Charlie knew where to stall and hide, I was still able to tag him. I even got good enough to tag him in front of another hider for proof, in case he denied it. He’d get frustrated when I would catch him—and I’d always pay for it later.
Wrestlers. Since Charlie sticks to his area in Gramita’s Split-Level, there’s no one for me to be with. My rubber wrestling action figures feel the most like me—not their pomp and circumstance or their flamboyant ring gear, but the deep misfortune of their performance.
“You’re getting too old to play with dolls, jito,” Grampo said years ago.
I’d told him that they weren’t dolls—action figures.
“It doesn’t matter. Your grampo needs help with his trucks. You know, you can make money as a mechanic.” He prized his trucks from the sixties and seventies. They looked like they were made of smooth candy-bar wrappers every time he finished waxing them.
“Grampo, Bronco Jackson and The Hangman have taken the sport to the next level!” I said.
“It’s not real, jito,” said Grampo. “It’s all a show.”
I tried not to show this bothered me as I handed him tools beneath a Ranger.
Wrestlers weren’t real, who they were on TV. The toys certainly weren’t real. Now, I only play with them sometimes but mostly hold and consider them in my hands. I don’t feel real, but I keep moving, bouncing from rope to rope.
The Tamale Lady. The Tamale Lady reminds me of Gramita in some ways, but she’s shorter and has feathery hair. Gramita would pay for the tamales, one dollar apiece, and tip the Tamale Lady extra—“Por la entrega,” she would say. Gramita’s own tamales tasted better, but the Tamale Lady’s are good, too. I miss the train-like chugging of Gramita’s pressure cooker and the decadent mixture of manteca with the frijoles that would come with any serving. Now it’s just tamales.
The Tamale Lady rings the doorbell with her deliveries. She knows that we won’t greet her, but she’s kept making them for us anyway, even after we ran out of nickels and pennies to leave her on the doorstep. She leaves votive candles and matches, too.
I think that Charlie will easily eat tamales for the rest of his life. He’s got to eat the ones with vegetables, but he’s a carnivore in spirit. I enjoy tamales still, but I would do anything for something different. I watch the Tamale Lady through the fancy dining room window as she hobbles down the sidewalk. Her hair has greyed from straightforward brown, same as her hooded eyes.
Mine. Charlie’s a creature of habit. Other than food, all he needs is his little lair. He’ll eat in the kitchen of Gramita’s Split-Level or in his room, from what I can tell. Down the stairs from his lair, Gramita’s Split-Level is kind of a no-man’s land.
I haven’t seen Charlie in Grampo’s Tower in ages. So I guess it’s mine. But the front door where the Tamale Lady leaves food is at Gramita’s Split-Level. I can usually eat in the fancy dining room. Is it mine or Charlie’s? It feels like mine then, until Charlie strikes. He’ll only chase me as far as the other side of the tunnel to Grampo’s chamber.
I know this because I tried giving him a wrestling action figure. I think it was Feral Gerald. It was a while ago. It was already nighttime, and I felt alone. I sat on the stairs between the fancy dining room and the kitchen of Gramita’s Split-Level. “Charlie, I’m sorry,” I said. I already wasn’t used to talking much and realized how quiet I sounded. So I said it louder.
It was quiet, maybe fall because there weren’t any crickets. In that moment, more than Gramita or Grampo, I missed Mama. Then my neck cracked—I saw a white flash and crashed to the floor before the front door, Charlie slapping my head with a wooden spoon.
“Away!” he rasped.
I blocked some of his spoon strikes with Feral Gerald. “I brought you this, I brought you this!”
He swiped the wrestler from me and I kicked him off. I backed into the fancy dining room.
He stared at me for a couple seconds, heaving. As quickly as he’d pounced on me, he threw Feral Gerald at my throat. Wheezing, I ran down the staircases all the way to the basement, him grunting all mouth-breathy behind me. I hopped into the tunnel, scraped my knee, him shuffling behind me until I rolled out the other side in Grampo’s chamber.
“Stay out!”
He didn’t follow me, but I hid in the room above Grampo’s special room. And I would never go there, not even for hide-and-seek long ago.
Boundary. Charlie drops so many crumbs from the kitchen on his way to his area, where I’m forbidden. When I’m bored, I pick up the crumbs at the boundary that he screeches at me not to be around. Sometimes I eat them like I’ve eaten his resentful snarls. I can hear Charlie pounding away at his garbage cans, gnawing at raspy words and gibberish.
“Go! Gah! Want more meat today!” he chants. “Go! Gah! Get outta my way!”
Maybe he is tired of tamales, too. He grumbles to himself like my stomach to me. I lie on the fancy dining room floor by Gramita’s rococo dining table and matching cupboard with her anniversary plates and porcelain birds. Gilded adornments on the corners of the cupboard stare back at me: tiger faces with eternal grimaces, fixtures since when we were babies.
TVs no longer function here and are caked with dust. We have books, but they’re all boring. I just read the dictionary with its building blocks of words, words that used to hold up houses of conversation. My days and nights are “dreary”—I read that word in the dictionary. When I can't sleep, I return to the kitchen near Charlie. I think of Gramita’s elotes dripping with butter, iceberg lettuce with tangy cool ranch, and I swallow the musty air to transform it into creamy gulps of chocolate ice cream from a cardboard box. If Charlie stops pounding the cans, I can fall asleep on the tiles until birds lure in the sunrise.
Charlie bangs a garbage can with a wooden spoon. “Leave!” he says, fidgeting batlike. “Away! Gah!”
“I just fell asleep,” I say, hugging my arms to my chest.
“Remember!” He holds up his forearm, with its scars from scalding water.
“It was an accident—I didn’t see you,” my stomach hardening, greying like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg.
Charlie bares his rotting teeth. “Away! Gah!”
Tears muck up my eyes, and I see the Tamale Lady across the street through the window. I scurry down the stairs from the fancy dining room down toward the study. In my head, I replay Charlie holding Gramita’s favorite pot and its boiling water—again—and my fatal mishap.
My Room and the Crib. In Grampo’s Tower, a couple stairs down from the laundry room, there’s my room. It’s in a corner where a now dirt-filmed window once provided a view to Gramita’s Split-Level from ground level. Blankets hang from the clothesline that I fastened to the walls with nails after Grampo got sick and when Gramita couldn’t regulate Charlie and me anymore. At the top of my bunk bed, I massage my stomach as it creaks for food.
The bedroom next to mine is the clearest—there’s no junk there, no broken furniture, no photos on the walls. It’s bare except for a crib. Charlie and I scavenged the room and never put anything in it because it pained us to try. Its void created so much pressure that it couldn’t hold anything else. I lift this room’s trapdoor in the corner and go down, grasping for a candle I left on the top stair and lighting its wick.
Grampo’s Chamber and Tunnels. My sockless, callused feet scratch against the stone down dozens of steps. I open the door with the flimsy doorknob to enter Grampo’s chamber. It was a rare treat for us to go in there when we were small—we ached to throw darts at Grampo’s dartboard anytime his chamber came up. We missed frequently if we were on our own, so he’d guide our small hands. The dartboard still hangs there, rotting, but we’ve lost all the darts.
The pipe organ still lumbers in Grampo’s chamber. Dust and dirt clog the pipes and build in the ruts between the keys. Only one key toots a dull noise, a black one. Charlie broke the bench before Gramita went away in the ambulance. When Grampo got sick, she’d spend an hour a day playing for him. Her nimble fingers danced on the keys, and he’d lie already corpselike in the canopy bed. She’d bring him tea.
“Te quiero, amor,” she would say to him as she stroked his wiry hair. Lying near his feet brought me peace—his rest was deep.
I look at the collapsed tunnel that we used to access through Grampo’s chamber. When Mama died in childbirth, Grampo built the tunnel to let Charlie and me go under the street to Mama’s house when we missed her. I kept my favorite stuffed animals there for company because she would play with them with me, invisibly. They felt like they belonged to Mama, and I could feel her rubbing my back if I hugged my teddy there after she went to Heaven. Even if I broke down with grief, I could fall asleep again for a full night in her bed.
On an adjacent wall, beads hang right in front of the tunnel to Gramita’s Split-Level. The tunnel floor often hurts my knees, but I hoist myself up anyway. I crawl in my shorts and remember when Charlie would hide here, which was against the rules. He never cared. He brought his friend Mitch in here, and when I followed them, they gave me wet willies. I tattled on him to Gramita—she’d become exhausted by that point and scolded him, pleading.
“¡No hagas esas cosas, Carlito!” she said, exasperated, approaching a shriek. “¿Qué dijera tu grampo?”
“He’s not allowed there with me and Mitch, Grama,” he said, the brat. “Grampo’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter.”
I heard Gramita sobbing after.
I nearly stumble from all fours out the other side of the tunnel and roll onto the couch in the basement of Gramita’s Split-Level. I can sleep now, I think.
Dreams. When I dream, I sit at the top of the chimney of Gramita’s Split-Level—the house’s highest point—and straighten my emaciated self to slide down. I pop into the basement and dust the soot from my shirt. I always search from here. I seek what I’ve done and what I’m about to commit, one in the same. I look behind the plastic curtain and inside the freezers that hold Gramita’s chile. I backtrack to the steel fireplace and dig under ashes, blackening beneath my fingernails. Underneath Grampo’s pool table, I find only a cue ball. I fall to my hands and feet and gallop up the burgundy-carpeted stairs as stuffed hawks and deer observe me with disdain. I reach the angled hall to the modest study, and I leap up to the fancy dining room, lit by the moon. I lift the top of Grampo’s wooden record-player entertainment center, and then I remember that the ambulance took Gramita to the hospital.
I run up the stairs that lead to the kitchen. In a silver garbage can, Charlie boils red hot dogs and dances. He’s cooked for us while Gramita’s gone.
“Get ketchup!” he says.
I swing the fridge door open and grab the bottle. I spin on one foot like an ice skater, around a few times, but my foot catches from under me, and I stumble and knock into Charlie. Water splashes onto him—he howls—and onto you, the baby, erupting with animalistic bawling, an apocalypse, and panic bursts in my stomach and I hyperventilate. Somehow, in place of the kitchen room, I’ve entered Mama’s room across the street. Dirt covers the floor, and Charlie and I dig with shovels strewn about. We dig for what feels like days. We sleep for just as long and wake up in the basement of Gramita’s Split-Level, on the shaky couch bed, beneath the circle of lights inlaid in Grampo’s mirror.
My eyes flutter open, and my stomach lurches—I hope the Tamale Lady comes soon.
“Nostalgia.” Some happy times were when me, Charlie, and Grampo went on walks around the block. It sounds simple, but I smile a little when I think of going on those walks. This is what “nostalgia” feels like. I read it in the dictionary. Grampo would lift me onto his shoulders while Charlie jumped up and down.
“You build that house, Grampo?” Charlie would say.
“A lot of it, jito. I bought it for your Gramita and me, then I built on top of it.”
The sun would hurt my eyes as I tried to count all the floors. Gramita’s Split-Level was like building blocks being shuffled, right before being smooshed together. I’d count its floors from underground, where the tunnel from Grampo’s Tower connected to the basement with his mirror. Then the study, a floor up but still underground. And there was the fancy dining room on ground level, and the kitchen on top of that, and what’s now Charlie’s area with his filthy bathroom, and more stairs to his room, Gramita and Grampo’s room across the hall, then the attic up above that. There’s a door that opens to stairs up to the attic which has a few floors of its own. I always wondered if there was a door to the roof from the top attic floor. Grampo would sweep the chimney, but he’d always use ladders to get up there from the outside, scaling each level then pulling the ladder up as he went. I can’t remember how he’d get back down.
Mama’s house was across the street, but we’d sleep at Gramita’s house whenever we could. Charlie and I had to share a room at Mama’s house. And it only had one floor, one kitchen, one bathroom. When I was little, we’d always eat dinner together at Gramita’s house, the five of us, after Mama got off of work.
We’d keep walking down the block, and Charlie and I would crane our necks back as we moved forward.
“The tower?” Charlie would ask. “How you build that?”
“With adobe, jito.”
I’d start counting levels again from the bottom of Grampo’s Tower. If it wasn’t for the long chimney on top of Gramita’s Split-Level, Grampo’s Tower would be taller.
On the other side of the tunnel connecting the two structures was Grampo’s chamber. Maybe the tunnel is slanted because it feels deeper than the basement of Gramita’s Split-Level—the stairs up to the crib room feel longer, too, even though it and my room are still underground. A couple steps up is the laundry room, which is right next to the underside of another staircase where old toys are stored—I’ve found all the wrestlers that were there, though. Those stairs lead up to another kitchen and dining room. We never really used that one—it was “just for pretty,” Gramita said. Above, there are empty bedrooms, then on top of those is Gramita’s special room with her chests. Seated on Grampo’s shoulders and looking higher, above Gramita’s special room, that’s where the sun would hurt my eyes. But if I squinted, I could tell where Grampo’s special room was.
There are more things in boxes in each room on top of Grampo’s special room, but the rooms aren’t as fancy. I can’t remember how many more rooms are on top of it in Grampo’s Tower—maybe four? I think there’s a point where the rooms stop but the walls of Grampo’s Tower continue upward.
There’s no reason to look anymore, really. I’m afraid that if I walk up too high, the floor will collapse.
Charlie’s. Charlie was never a big talker. But if he had a question or something to say, he’d shoot it right out if he wanted, eagerly await a response.
“Why you got that, how you get that?” He’d always ask Grampo stuff like that. Then Grampo would tell him, straight and to the point like shooting the cue ball. I guess they were kind of alike.
Once, Charlie was up in Grampo’s special room. He took down one of Grampo’s taxidermy hangings—they still looked alive and ready to stride, gallop, or fly back to the hills and mountains. I think Charlie had gotten a hawk down and was making it fly through the room. Grampo caught him and had his belt whipping Charlie’s ass before the stuffed hawk could hit the hardwood.
Sniffling, Charlie listened while Grampo gave him a stern explanation of nice things and how they weren’t toys. I listened at the top of the stairs, up from Gramita’s special room. “They’re there for pretty, jito. You understand?”
Charlie nodded, shuddering as he breathed in while I tried to keep a giggle in.
After that incident, Charlie respected Grampo’s stuff. He was content to stay in his room and play there. He’s the same way now, only lurking down the steps to his bathroom or to start munching on tamales in the kitchen in Gramita’s Split-Level. Then he lurks back up. Unless he’s chasing me.
The Mirror. In the basement of Gramita’s Split-Level is Grampo’s mirror. Inside it is a circle of lights, like burnt-orange Christmas lights inside a tube. Because maybe there’s a mirror behind, the halo reflects itself back and forth like ripples in a pond. Except instead of moving outward, they move inward and deeper with each light ring, as if it were a tunnel. It’s like the path Mama said we take when the other side begins to take us to Heaven.
I brush dust from its glass and look at my face. It’s a mess of pimples, like my face is burned, with wiry hairs poking from my chin and upper lip. Grampo had a moustache. Maybe I’ll be able to grow a real one someday.
Play. I don’t have fun anymore, but I enjoy myself from time to time. No matter how old I am, I’ll always cherish my wrestling action figures. Maybe I actually do play with them more often than I think. Randy Patters and his mountain-man beard, Feral Gerald and his holey clothes, Big Fontaine the seven-footer—each play their role in the battle royale on the coffee table in the den. But I love none as much as The Hangman. No one’s ever seen his face beneath his baggy executioner’s mask, and he performs the most devastating power bomb known to man.
He always wins against the other guys. I can never allow anybody but The Hangman to prevail. He can take on as many as six wrestlers—the amount of other wrestlers that I can still find around Gramita's house. I think it’s because I’ve always admired antiheroes. I saw that word in the dictionary, too, “antihero.” He was too dark to be a regular Face—battling them often—but always took on the Heels. I’ve always shrouded myself away from the light of goodness. My goodness comes through my silent, unseen acts. Only God knows my true intentions as I pick up around the house, throw trash in the garbage heap out back, or try to fix a toilet.
Knives. Up in Grampo’s special room are his piano, antique liquor cabinet, and his coin and knife collections. The knives’ hilts are the heads of fierce animals—dragons, a few panthers, and birds of prey. Charlie’s favorite is the cobra with its ruby eyes. Mine is the snowy white wolf with its eyes of sapphire.
“When I croak, I want you boys to have my knives,” Grampo said once after a glass of whiskey. “You have to take very good care of them. You’ve gotta sharpen them and polish them. Be sure to dust the glass and to polish their frames, too.”
“Why you got so many?” Charlie said.
“They’re pretty, jito. The strong animals and the knives I have here, they call on the spirits of the animals on the handles. They give us strength for when we face challenges.”
I know that Charlie would probably appreciate having his favorite knife around, even if he doesn’t think about it anymore. He knew not to disturb Grampo’s sanctuary. But now, with him gone, it would do us better to carry our memory of him with us, to help him reach us beyond this floor.
Reconciliation. I hold the cobra knife close to my chest, wrapped in a rag. Since I feel weak like an old man, the crawl in the tunnel is more difficult without a second arm as I move inside of it. Once I reach the basement of Gramita’s Split-Level, I gently toss the bundled knife onto the couch and groan in relief that I don’t fall on top of it. I tiptoe up each flight of stairs until I reach Charlie’s boundary. I hesitate then creep upstairs. His bathroom stinks with even the door just cracked. I walk to the end of the hall and tap his door.
A jostle. The thud of a body’s weight pounding onto the floor. A grunt. Butterflies flap wildly in my empty stomach. The door swings open. Charlie scowls, and I see his yellow, rotting teeth.
“What you want?” he says, ready to mangle me. I quickly unwrap the cobra knife and hold the tip of the hilt in my right hand and the blade’s point in my left. The golden cobra head stares at Charlie, who stares at the rubies, decompressing like a ball leaking air. “Needa bring the case,” he says.
After a long time, he feels something other than anger.
Memory. I can’t remember. After the screams, the bathtub of cool water, and the silence that followed, the lines between my dreams, Charlie’s rage, and all the time that’s passed blur together. I’ll see tunnels that never existed then wake up. I’ll think that I’ve woken up next to Charlie, and there will be a shadow in the room with a voice like a buzz saw calling me a fucker—and I can’t move, my chest tightens, and someone presses down harder. Then I’ll jolt awake sweating. When I ask Charlie, he just says, “Just remember dirt.”
Waking Up. Charlie has slept next to me on the bed in Gramita’s special room. He snores, and the sun has just started to climb into the sky with whispery rays breaking the clouds outside the window. Trying not to wake him—why’s he so irritable?—I quietly step to the hardwood floor and open the sheer drapes to look out the window. The garbage in the backyard has piled to create a wasteland. Mountains of pages from flapping magazines and books now cover a plastic-bag core. We probably reek of its odors. We used to run through the sprinklers there, then eat cherry popsicles on the back porch, our hands sticking to the rubber of our wrestlers.
I placed The Hangman on the ground next to the bed before falling asleep last night. I pick him up and consider him, rolling him between my hands. He’s horribly scuffed—a thousand cuts, no death—and the paint has worn off the tip of his executioner’s mask, revealing a dull lead color. I’ve carried him around all these years, and I’ve never felt too old to play with him. But he’s also a myth about the past, a match that never ends.
Charlie’s still snoring. At least he’s a sack of organs that still function. I stand The Hangman on the windowsill looking out. I hope he’s looking past the garbage, toward the mountains—the real ones made of dirt and stone.
Looking Around. I turn to Charlie and tossle his greasy hair. He moans, grumpy. “We need to figure something out,” I say.
“Don’t know what you’re saying,” he says. He rolls the other way and hugs his pillow.
“We’ve been here for too long,” I say. “We gotta leave. We’re gonna die here.”
“Nothing for us anywhere,” he says.
But I pry. I remind him about the Tamale Lady, that people do it, they survive, press on.
“She keeps cooking tamales,” I say.
There’s no reason we can’t try to create new lives. We decide to “think hard,” as Charlie says. We know little of what’s past our street, or if there are still houses on the block, or if anyone would be inside them, or if they’d care.
Nothing comes. We don’t have money—or a car, except what might be rusting in the garage. “But our home,” says Charlie, cradling his cobra knife like a baby. “What ’bout Grampo? Wouldn’t want us leaving.”
“What does it matter?” I say.
We wander through Gramita’s house for ideas. We climb up past Grampo’s special room with the photographs of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents hanging from the staircase walls. We lie on the couches of a living room in Grampo’s Tower. In Gramita’s Split-Level, we slowly inch down the spiral staircase from the fancy dining room into the basement below then back up again. It may be that we want to relive all the wonder and comfort that the house once gave to us as children. It may also be that we don’t know what to do other than walk and jump around, even though our joints and muscles are killing us.
Antlers. Charlie and I root around in Grampo’s special room—not like we’re wrecking it, but with our eyes. We peek behind his encased polished coins from the turn of the century, and I sit on Charlie's shoulders to look inside hanging lamps infested with spiderwebs. Cobwebbed taxidermy stares us down, as if they are guardians of this windowless place. Charlie brought his garbage can to stand on. It was a pain to scoot it through the tunnel. Now he’s given up and taps it, not daring to bang it in Grampo’s special room.
We take turns sniffing an old bottle of whiskey, passing it to each other as if we were taking pulls. Charlie hands me the bottle, and I lower my head to it and notice a space where a deer’s head should be. After all this time, I haven’t seen the four little holes in the wall where a plaque’s screws should go.
“Remember that deer’s head?”
“Don’t know,” says Charlie.
There was a deer’s head there—I’m sure.
We drop to all fours and crawl toward the corners and in between shelves—then between a locked chest and a case holding coins, I see the back of a plaque lodged low to the ground. I hop to my feet and pull on it. With a few tugs, it comes loose. I turn the deer’s face to me and see its blank stare, its antlers sawed off.
“Gah!” Charlie says as his eyes widen with revelation. “Mirror!”
The Mirror. Charlie lugs Gramita’s vacuum down to the basement in Gramita’s Split-Level, and I put on her rotting gardening gloves. We stare at the mirror with its ring of lights turned on, the wreath of burnt orange, and stare into its reflections of the light ring as it shrinks inward, behind the glass. Charlie grips a pool stick from Grampo’s pool table.
“Feel bad,” he says. He’s never seemed to feel much guilt at all; he’s left his area of Gramita's house a wreck. But the prospect of the utter destruction of Grampo’s possessions causes his face to heave red, dotted with beads of sweat. We try moving the mirror aside, but time has glued it to the wall.
“We have to,” I say.
Charlie hesitates. Then, as if Grampo were watching, Charlie, commanding his natural defiance, bunts the mirror with the fat end of the cue. It shatters, revealing a tunnel that the lights encircle.
I pick up the glass with the gloves on and toss it into one of Charlie’s garbage cans. Charlie vacuums up the small bits, the ancient machine gargling them in. I break the triangle shards that remain on the frame of the former mirror until each side no longer threatens with mortified teeth, and I throw a blanket through the frame.
“Ready?” says Charlie.
“I guess so,” I say.
Charlie stacks the couch cushions and mounts them on all fours. I slide a rusty hand shovel into the opening and climb onto Charlie’s back. I lift myself up into the opening and push the shovel down the slope.
Descent. I crawl down, nearly a foot of space between me and the tunnel’s walls. The continued rings of lights illuminate the way—never reflections, only our gaunt faces were. I begin to remember. I had moved down first, backward, and Charlie slid your bundle toward me. I get dizzy—I pass countless rings of light only to see another down the way as I move deeper through this forgotten tunnel. The air feels cooler, and I wish that I’d worn one of Grampo’s sweaters.
After maybe a dozen minutes, the surface I crawl on bottoms out, becomes coarse, and changes to dirt. The rings of light end. I keep crawling. The lights barely throw themselves on the small quarter I’ve reached. I can make out a small mound of dirt in front of me, and I tremble with my shovel in hand. As I stab the dirt delicately, I begin to weep.
Elegy. It only takes me a few scoops of the shovel to reveal the blanket we wrapped you in. From there, I use my fingers to unbury you. The antlers that we made your crown—their bases tucked between your head and the blanket—emerge as I claw the dirt. I can barely see, but when I unwrap the cloth from your face, I already know that you’ve become a mummy. I quiver all the way back up the lighted tunnel. I choke to Charlie to help me, to grab you. We lay you on the pool table and hug each other and cry like madmen.
We remember now. A good chunk of it, at least. After we scalded you, we tried to bathe you in cool water, but we don’t know if we drowned you instead. We are sorry. Everyone was dying, and death swept us up with them but forgot to kill us. Maybe we sacrificed you on accident. We seek to be absolved. Maybe we’ll wander into the knolls behind Gramita’s house and climb the crags to go live in the mountains. We will live with what we did to you, but we can’t live inside of it anymore.
We’ve hanged your toddler body on the front door—crown antlers and all, the blanket cradling you, nailed to the door with Grampo’s cobra and wolf knives. We will await the Tamale Lady’s shriek to echo through the hills and bounce of the mountainside, hearing it from a distance. We will go hungry some more. We’ll love you forever. We’ll make our own home.