Houses Like Piñatas
Christie Marra
The dragonflies have almost carried me to shore when the stench of my shipmates wakes me. The green sea surrounds us, imprisoning our tiny boat; the sight of it makes me cry. I don’t know the day, or even the month. It could be June, or perhaps we passed into July floating on this water. I’m no longer sure. Daylight comes and goes, and some nights are bright as days, the white moon illuminating our eleven contorted bodies crammed into this rocking space, spotlighting faces that can’t rest even in sleep.
The rain has stopped. But there’s no sun, nothing to pull the water from my dress. It clings to me like a second skin, shaping my two legs into one, like the tail of a mermaid. If I were a mermaid, I’d escape the smell of vomit and piss, jump into the sea, and swim to the sandy bottom. Maybe meet a merman, build a home behind some swaying seaweed.
When did I last look into Mama’s eyes? On my eighteenth birthday she told me, You can be whatever you wish to be. Not because of your beauty, but because of your heart. I followed my heart and ended up on this crowded boat rocking in the Atlantic, heading to a hope Mama planted in me after Papa disappeared, a hope that this boat has sunk.
“Not much longer, eh,” a man with a face the color of Mama’s best leather bag and a beard coated with sea salt says in English. I stare silently at him, and he blows air out his nose and turns away. Content with his pouch of money, he doesn’t care that I am not supposed to be here, that panic and desperation made me hand him all the U.S. dollars I had and jump on board with the others. The man tugs on his beard and turns back to me. “Don’t you ever say anything?”
I stare at him some more, wondering whether he’ll eat the salt he pulls from his wiry gray whiskers.
Keeping my promise to Mama is easy on this boat. On your journey, don’t speak unless they speak to you in Spanish. No English until you arrive at the address. Just nod and give them the letter. Of course, now there is no letter. The sea has swallowed it.
I look for land. But all I see is green water, ending abruptly in the distance in every direction. I understand why generations believed the earth was flat.
I’m tired. I haven’t slept for two days. The day before my flight I was too nervous to sleep, and of course I couldn’t sleep the next day after all that happened. Maybe it was sleep deprivation that made getting on this boat seem wise.
Making a small shelf with my crossed arms on the boat’s side, I lay my head on top of it. I try to rock with the boat, hoping it will soothe me, but my stomach objects and I feel something coming up, although I haven’t eaten in days.
I lean over the boat’s edge, wishing something—anything!—would spurt out and relieve my constant nausea. Nothing. I am completely empty.
My nausea stays with me as the boat rocks through the black, moonless night and into the white sun, squeezing me into a ball. I’m trying to decide whether to surrender to the sea when the man with the salty beard yells, “Ship!”
I hold the rough edge of the boat and pull up. A white blur moves slowly towards us. Is it a ship? Or a mirage?
The white blur stops moving. Squinting at it makes my eyes hurt; I close them and breathe deeply. Someone else shouts.
My boatmates buzz like flies above a carcass.
The white blur stops moving for a few minutes, and when it starts again, it’s moving away from us.
“No!” we yell. Someone starts sobbing. The man with the salty beard curses.
I can’t bear it. Inhaling deeply again, I tumble into the water.
It’s surprisingly warm. I hold my breath and let my body sink, waiting to land in the soft sand. But before I hit bottom, some invisible force takes over and moves my arms and legs wildly until I reach the surface.
Gulping air, I swim as best I can. Paddle, kick, pause, breathe, paddle, kick, pause, breathe. Over and over until my arms refuse to move. My breathing slows, my eyes focus, and I realize I’m alone. The tiny, overcrowded boat has become a distant dot.
“No!” I cry.
The low, deep sound of a horn drowns out my cries. I turn toward it, and the ship is so close I can read the golden words on its side: Psychic Prince.
Gently bobbing in place, the ship seems safe and inviting. I swim towards it but am forced to rest every few seconds, fearing the ship will pull away. It continues bobbing, and I continue swimming toward it, stopping, moving, stopping, moving, until finally I’m close enough to touch it.
The ship’s side feels smooth and clean, so unlike the vessel I’ve been trapped on for days. Pulling myself along its hull slowly, I reach the end of the ship, where the distance from bottom to deck is shortest. Grabbing hold of the edge of the boat, I try to lift myself up and over. Weak, I hang to the edge, drop back into the water, grab hold and pull up again. Again, I fall. I grab hold again, but now I push against the ship with my feet, hoisting my body high enough to throw myself aboard.
The ship’s deck is warm, and I spread myself across it, arms wide, legs far apart. For the first time since the taxi ride, my body feels familiar. I long to let myself slip into sleep on the sun-soaked wood, but I don’t dare. Someone is on this ship, and I don’t think they’ll want a stowaway. I squat, wringing the salt water from my clothes as I listen for movements on the ship. Nothing. Only the sea lapping at its sides.
I stand slowly. Two short sets of steps on either side of the deck lead up to the ship’s next level. Noiselessly, I cross the deck and climb the stairs. At the top is a miniature version of the courtyard behind my family’s villa, a tiny pool, rectangular table with chairs, a small bar set with a decanter of clear liquid and four glasses. Beside the decanter is a beautiful tubular sculpture made of deep blue glass decorated with green swirls, curling oddly at the bottom into a piece of metal. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Bringing it to my face, I smell something powerful, earth and flower and thick grass rolled together. I inhale deeper.
“Hello there.”
I jump, dropping the sculpture, and it shatters against the hard wood of the deck. Closing my eyes, I wait for arms to grab me, reminding myself of Mama’s rule: No inglés. Solamente español.
“Are you a creature of the sea?” The man’s voice behind me is surprisingly calm and welcoming. It must be a trick. He wants me to trust him so I’ll let down my defenses, then he’ll capture me, bind me with ropes and turn me over to the authorities. I want to run, but I’m afraid of cutting my feet on the shards of glass surrounding me. Maybe the man is fat and old, and I can leap over the glass and outrun him.
I turn and jump, but when I land a piercing pain shoots through my feet.
“Hey, where are you going?” The man who appears in front of me is neither fat nor old.
He is beautiful.
Towering above me, a face framed by sunlit hair grins, revealing teeth straight and white below an angular nose and glowing green eyes specked with gold. Lowering my eyes, I stare at his bare, broad chest, trying not to cry out in pain.
“Are you an angel?”
I remain mute, staring at my bleeding feet.
He reaches for my hands, and I pull back, drawing my arms into my chest. “I won’t hurt you.” He steps back and stares at me. Suddenly, he turns and runs down another set of steps I hadn’t noticed. Before I can decide whether to stay or jump back into the sea, he returns and wraps me in a towel that’s almost as large and soft as the towels back home. Trying to block the memories and the tears, I pull the towel tightly around me.
“Come, my lovely sea creature,” he says, reaching again for my hand. This time I let him take it. He starts to lead me down the steps, but I yelp in pain as I move my cut feet. The beautiful man picks me up and carries me down to a cabin. Across from the bed is a door in the wall. He opens the door and pulls out a long, sleeveless dress of green organdy, peach roses climbing up its side. “Here.” He hands it to me, and I see that it is backless. Walking through the door he’s nodding toward, I enter a marble and bronze head that reminds me of our summer house.
This will all be yours someday, no matter what the boys say.
Mine and my husband’s, I’d replied.
YOURS, no matter if you marry or not. Just yours. She’d been so certain it would all still be there when I returned.
The hot water pours down on my body, soothing me until it sneaks onto the soles of my feet, passing through my cuts like a knife. I try to ignore the pain, scrubbing my skin hard with the washcloth soaked in lavender soap to remove the smell of seaweed and brine. If I close my eyes and scrub hard enough, maybe it will all disappear, the sea and the ship and the sound of the strange, beautiful man singing. I want to open my eyes to the bathroom in our summer house and find it was all a dream: the revolution, my father’s mysterious departure, the weeks of hiding behind the walls of our villa, leaving in the middle of the darkest night when the moon and stars had fallen into the shadows. The driver that promised Mama he’d take me to my midnight flight.
“Does the dress fit?” the man calls from outside the bathroom door. I open my eyes and leave the shower reluctantly. I pull the dress over my head. It fits perfectly.
“Come out and show me, my little mermaid.”
Walking towards the man, I pass the bed. There’s a thick white blanket topping it and a mound of pillows atop the blanket. I run my hands along the blanket. It tugs at my skin, and I’m too weak from days on the water to resist. The pillows are silky and soft against my cheek, and I’m soon sound asleep.
The beautiful man sits on the floor, cross-legged and smoking a pipe made of swirling blue and green glass.
“Good morning, Mermaid,” he says, rising and placing the pipe on the table beside the bed. “Did you have a tail when you were in the water?”
He sounds serious, and I start to wonder whether this beautiful man is crazy. I sit, pull my knees into my chest, and press my back into a pillow.
“Don’t be frightened.”
I blush, hating how easily he reads me.
I never know what you are thinking, or what you feel, Juan used to tell me. I liked it that way.
“It’s ok,” the beautiful man says. “We’re all connected, to each other, to the earth, to the mighty seas.”
I frown at him.
“Ah, you have lost your sense of connection.” He moves onto the bed, and I try to pull further into the pillow. “Humans have become disconnected from the earth, and that makes us afraid. To be secure, to have control over our destinies, we have to be rooted in the earth in an authentic way.” He takes another long drag from the blue-green pipe. “If we continue to see ourselves as separate from Mother Earth, it will lead to scarcity and poverty and haves and have nots.”
They call us THE HAVES, Mama told me. As if we have everything, as if none of us have lost parents, as I did when I was only nine years old, or even one parent, as you did when your father left. He had to leave us, mi cielito. If he could have stayed, he would be beside you now. Instead, you don’t have him, or your abuelos. So why do they call us THE HAVES, mi cielito?
“We need to transcend materialism,” the beautiful man continues. “It doesn’t matter if I have a yacht and you live in a one room shack. We’re the same, and we share this earth. Man has created all these boundaries that divide him from his brothers.”
Why do they care so much about their brothers and not at all about their sisters?
“If we don’t break down the barriers, the poor will become poorer, the rich will become richer, the beautiful more beautiful and the ugly uglier.”
Before the taxi ride from my home, I’d never found anyone ugly.
“But if we can dissolve those boundaries and allow ourselves to fully experience ourselves in relationship to the natural world, we’ll see that humans are just one entity, just as the sky and the sea and the earth are each their own creatures, and we can all live in harmony.”
I remember pretending the distant gunfire was fireworks, closing my eyes as I sat beneath the papaya tree in our yard, picturing the colors bursting into a million falling stars. Our boundary allowed me to believe in fireworks, and my belief made me feel safe. Beyond our boundary, my safety shattered.
“You think it’s impossible,” the beautiful man says. “That because we are human, we are by our very nature disconnected from the earth and sea and sky, trapped by our bodies. But we don’t have to be!” He leans closer, and his incense scent transports me back to our church, the only sanctuary we had outside of our walled villa. I wish I were there, watching the stained-glass windows paint the sunlight.
“We all came from Mother Earth, and the key to reconnecting to her is psychedelics.” Mama said without drugs, the regime wouldn’t have fallen. Taking drug money was their sin, but we are all going to hell for it.
“Don’t believe what the closed-minded tell you. Psychedelics can unlock the door back to the earth. All people are organic, a manifestation of the earth. When you connect under the influence of psychedelics, you consciously inhabit the whole earth and you’re healed.”
I pull my knees into my chest. The beautiful man stops talking, and my grumbling stomach fills the silence. I blush but continue to stare at him, his beauty stronger than my embarrassment. I inhale deeply, clinging to the way his scent takes me back to Sunday mornings at home. Unlike the taxi driver, who made me nervous as soon as we pulled away from the curve, the beautiful man calms me, perhaps because he speaks about the earth’s healing powers and says material things aren’t important. I no longer have material things, and oh how I want to heal!
His lips are soft and my lips open to his, my mouth moving beneath his as if it’s disconnected from my brain. Tiny currents pulse through my body. These pleasure pulses suppress the memories of the tiny boat’s stench, my struggle to reach this ship, and the horror of what happened in the taxicab. I feel happy and light for the first time in months, maybe years.
He takes his lips away from my mouth and puts them on my neck, moving them lower and lower, making the pulsing currents inside me race and scream. I pull back and try to push him away, realizing instantly that I am too weak.
Laughing, he sits up. “Too much, huh, my little mermaid?” He stands and walks toward the door. “We should be docking soon anyway,” he says as he leaves.
I smooth the wrinkled skirt of the dress with trembling hands. Until now, my only romantic kisses had been with Juan. Juan smelled of fish and his kisses were wet and lasted too long. I was happy when they ended. But I’d wanted the beautiful man to kiss me forever, and now that he’s left I wish I hadn’t pushed him away.
Maybe losing my letter and leaving the tiny boat were fortuitous, links in a magical chain connecting me to him. I wonder whether he will take me to his home when the ship docks, imagining it is even grander than this home on the water.
When you get to the United States, go straight to the address in this letter, Mama directed, and I promised I would. But now there is no letter, and the sea has washed away any recollection of the address I may have had.
Walking up the stairs, I ignore the hunger gnawing at my stomach. The day is bright, but even the strong sun in my eyes can’t hide the sight in front of me. Land! Buildings and streets, cars and bicycles on ground that is dry and solid. We pull up to the dock, and the beautiful man appears at my side. He helps me out of the boat, and we walk hand in hand across the dock to the street, where he stops and turns to me.
“Goodbye, my lovely mermaid.” He kisses me lightly on the lips and leaves, whistling as he walks away. I want to call out to him, but people are everywhere and Mama’s warning rings in my head. No English until you reach the address. I feel tears forming and don’t try to fight them.
People pass me as if I am invisible. Some yell to others as they hurry away, warning them not to get left behind. The dock isn’t a destination, it’s a chaotic passageway to places I don’t know where I fear I won’t be welcome. I can’t simply stand in the midst of it, so I follow one of the people brushing past, a short, round woman moving slower than the others.
I follow her off the dock onto an equally crowded sidewalk, stopping each time she turns her head. I don’t know what compels me to keep following her. Maybe it’s her height and the dark, tight bun of hair on her head, so much like Mama’s. Perhaps it’s because I have no other plan.
The woman turns off the busy street and down a shady road lined with long, narrow single-story houses painted in bright colors. They remind me of the piñatas we hung from our papaya tree for the younger cousins’ birthdays. The houses stop at a long emerald lawn. The woman continues onto the lawn, but I hang back. A gray stone building sits in the middle of the lawn. The woman makes her way down the path to the stone building, mounts the steps, and enters.
I feel lost, abandoned by my only guide in this unknown land. I want to enter the building too, but I’m afraid I won’t be welcome.
Be careful in the United States, Mama warned me. They do not like strangers there. You must know someone who can make introductions and vouch for you. The man at the address will do that.
What will he want in return, Mama?
Mama shook her head. He will want nothing. It is a favor to your father.
It doesn’t matter what he wants now.
I approach the stone building cautiously. If anyone comes out, I can walk quickly back to the street. Nobody comes. The door is wooden and heavy, and I have to pull with both arms to open it. I’m rewarded with the scent of incense, the sound of silence and the sight of the Virgin Mary, skin honey-colored like mine, smiling down at the empty pews from the altar. Crossing myself, I head down the aisle toward the brown Madonna. I look up toward where Jesus should be, but all I see above Mary are glowing stained glass windows. My legs feel loose suddenly, as if they’d turned to leaves. They fall and the rest of me follows.
I open my eyes to excited voices of women rushing toward me. One of them helps me sit up. Another hands me water and, when I spill it with my trembling hand, lifts the cup to my mouth. I drink it in one gulp.
“Does she need a doctor?” a woman asks.
“Yes, call Doc Gracie,” answers another.
“Doc Gracie’s on vacation. We’ll have to take her to the hospital.”
Stay away from official places, police stations and hospitals and schools, until you are with the man and he can vouch for you.
“No llevan me al hospital!” I beg. The women look confused. “Por favor, no llevan me al hospital,” I repeat in a whisper.
The short woman I followed to the church frowns. A woman in a black dress with a deep red scarf draped around her neck takes my hands. “Where will you go if we don’t take you—” she pauses. “Where will you go?” Her bright gray eyes remind me of my cat, Loco. Papa gave me Loco for my twelfth birthday, and he slept with me every night. Two days before Papa left, we discovered Loco dead in the courtyard, blood seeping from the holes the bullet made.
His death made it harder to pretend fireworks caused the pops and bangs we heard every night.
“If we take her to the hospital now, we’ll be just like them, ignoring the instincts of women,” says a large woman in a bright yellow, shapeless dress.
“We know nothing about her or the danger she may be in,” the short, round woman I followed here replies. “What if her danger becomes our danger?”
“It already is,” says the woman with Loco’s eyes. “What are you afraid of?” she asks me.
I don’t know what to say. I should have nothing left to fear. I think about the purple circles on my breasts left by the taxi driver, and rocking in the tiny boat beside the man with the salty beard, and being abandoned by the beautiful man. I’ve lost my homeland and my family, and the only way to regain them is through a man whose name and address are adrift in the sea. My head is spinning. My stomach is empty. I want to go home, but I don’t know if it still exists.
“No casa,” I say. “No casa.”
The gray-eyed woman motions to the others and they draw together like the folds of paper in the American game we played as children, in which the movements of the paper foretold our future. When the women separate, the gray-eyed woman smiles and holds out her hand. She leads me out of the church into the parking lot, to a bus covered in giant painted heads. Many of the heads depict the brown Madonna inside. Others are of a woman who looks like Cleopatra. I’m transfixed before the paintings.
“That’s Maat on the bus with Mary,” the woman who unknowingly guided me to the church says. “She was the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice. We like to imagine Maat and Mary as sisters, just as justice and love are sister ideals.” She holds out her hand to me, and I follow her onto the bus. The bus rolls away from the church and moves down the street past the houses painted like piñatas. From my seat beside the window, I can see two small girls twirling on a front lawn, their heads thrown back in laughter.
Christie Marra is a legal aid attorney and dance fitness instructor who writes fiction in Richmond, Virginia. She is passionate about writing, social justice and pole sport (aka pole dance), and hopes to someday live in a house on the beach with a wall of windows through which to watch the waves as she writes and poles.