Art: Memories from the Multiverse: Comfortably Between by Erik Leraz
LOS(T) BARRACHOS
Viviana and I were smoking up when we got the call—our father was in the hospital, having been in another drunk driving accident. We sighed in unison, hoped he didn’t kill anybody, and sped to the hospital. My cousins Angelo and Tony were standing in the parking lot. They crinkled their noses as we got out of the car and the weed-stink hit them. We relieved them of their duties and they left, leaving prayers and the faint smell of mothballs.
In the hospital, I looked down at my father as he writhed on the gurney, impossibly small. His neck was in a brace. He was begging for an Ativan. He ripped out his I.V. and tried to get up. I pushed him back and held him down while a nurse stuck the needle back into his arm.
I woke one morning and walked out the front door to find two of my uncles, both of them drunk, fighting in the street. It was seven a.m. on a Monday when they tumbled down the asphalt, taking pathetic swings at one another. Felipe ripped his shirt off, his nipple piercing glimmering in the sunlight. Rogelio charged at him and the two went stumbling to the ground. Rogelio wrapped his hands around Felipe’s neck while Felipe, turning red in the face, sputtered, “I’m going to kill you,” and reached toward his pocket knife. I ran across the street to get Apa, my abuelo. He came out of the house with my grandmother, Ama, who sped over and threw herself into the scuffle until she had them both by the ears. “You’re nearly thirty years old!’ she yelled, dragging them back home. “Apa,” I said, and he turned to me with his perpetually ambivalent, unreadable face. Sad or amused. “I need a ride to school.” He went home to start his van while I went inside to grab my backpack. I walked across the street and passed Felipe on my way inside.
“What happened?” I asked, keeping my distance. “Fuck them!” he said, “Roy’s drunk and running his mouth as usual.” “I’m glad your piercing didn’t fall out,” I said. He nodded. Apa came outside with his keys and we climbed into his big white van. “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. played on the radio. I turned it up. Apa grimaced and changed it to his weird accordion music. I looked at the field as we drove, the plain, flat expanse out of which my family burst like a nest of wasps. He dropped me off at school. I watched as he drove away. His “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker grew smaller and smaller until he turned the corner and was gone.
About the author:
Angelica Esquivel is a recent graduate from the University of Michigan, where her fiction and poetry received three Undergraduate Hopwood Awards as well as the Quinn Creative Writing Thesis Prize. Her work has been published in Obra/Artifact and Soundings East.
Art: Memories from the Multiverse: Comfortably Between by Erik Leraz
In the artist’s words:
Erik Leraz is about as normal as normal can be when it comes to abusing words, sounds and imagery so as to disturb what is sometimes the vast unknown of actual reality.