Miscege Nation

This is a short story I wrote. Enjoy it because my creative juices only work about every 6 months. So you may not get another story. Here it is:


"Miscege Nation"


Last week on the way home from school Carmen called me a gringo. I went home and asked Mamí what a gringo was. Papí got very quiet and Mamí had that look like she will cry.
Yesterday on the way home from school Ronny called me a spic. I went home and asked Mamí what a spic was. Papí got very quiet and Mamí had that look like she will cry.
I don’t ask questions anymore.

Sometimes if all three of us are in a very good mood all at the same time, Mamí and Papí will tell me our story. Papí says he lived in Opa-locka all his life but when he was nineteen he moved into the city because he couldn’t stand living with his daddy, my granddaddy, anymore. Mamí says she lived in a village in México until she ran away to el Ciudad del México where she earned nickels as a waitress until she scraped up enough to cross the border but then she had to take a bus all the way around to Florida because her primo said she could live with him and his esposa in his apartamento in Miami.
She says ‘and then your Papí and I met and fell in love, but you can hear that story later when you’re older.’ And Papí jokes ‘just like that West Side Story’ and Mamí laughs her tinkle laugh but I’m confused because I learned in school that we live on the east coast.

Papí has a cowboy gun. I found it when I was where I wasn’t supposed to be. I was looking in his drawer for his binoculars he got from Granddaddy that he lets me use sometimes. I wanted to see if I could find jaguars in the alley or quetzals on the roof like the ones Mamí says are in the jungles of América del Sur. I see the gun and I get scared and shut the drawer and run to my room.
Then I remember the binoculars. But the butterflies Papí talks about are making me nervous so I decide to forget the quetzals and the jaguars until another day. So I play with my Suzie doll, the one Papí got me for my birthday that has skin whiter than mine and hair yellower than mine. I call Suzie a spic and she just stares at me so I call her a gringo and she just stares at me so I don’t know which one I’m supposed to call her.

There’s an angry knock on the door and Mamí goes to the door to look through the hole and she whispers ‘Ay, Dios mio, that dirty landlord again,’ and she crosses herself and takes a deep breath and opens the door. And he comes in with his fire red hair yelling about the rent and how he’s tired of it being late and he’s tired of asking her for it and why can’t she just pay up like everyone else. Mamí says ‘I’m sorry, Señor,” and he gets madder and redder and shouts that he does not speak any damn Spanish, thank you very much, and will she please remember that this is fucking America, not Mexico, so will she learn some goddamn English! I see Mamí’s eyes flash and then she’s screaming at him in Español and when she pushes his chest he grabs her arm and twists and with a gasp she stops screaming and he says quiet but hard, ‘Do not ever touch me again, you dirty spic whore.’ He shoves her away and leaves our apartamento and Mamí slams the door shut behind him. She breathes hard and bangs on the door one, two, three, four times fast and then she turns around and leans against it. When she sees that I am watching, she gets that look like she will cry.

When Papí comes home she tells him what the landlord said and what she said and what the landlord said back. She shows him the bruises wrapped around her wrist and he does not say a word and his face is stone.

Papí says very serious ‘I will take care of this’ and he looks just like the cowboys on the movies that he watches sometimes. Mamí gets that look like she will cry and she looks just like the beautiful señoritas on the Spanish soap operas that she watches sometimes.