the time i try to run
you hold me down
i am seven or eight years old
get up to run to my room
can't stop crying
stay here you say
your arm around me
when i resist you use both arms
stay here you say
just stay
i’m hyperventilating
though i don't know that word yet
can't breathe
can't move
you are too strong for me to go
but in between breaths i find
there is a space
inside your arms
against your side
it is the space between bars of a cage
it is the air between branches
of closely planted trees
but if i make myself small
and thin
and still
i just might fit
if i shallow
my breath
and wait
and wait
i can make room for myself in here
if i shrink and slow my breathing
there is a place i make inside
inside your arms
and deep inside of me
and that is where i go and hide
you hold me
that is where i stay and calm
you pray
say you love me
and this is how i learn love is this way
those who love me hurt me
but everything will be okay
if i just
stay
and shrink
and learn to live without
breathing
deeply
that night I dream of running through trees
I. Skin Like Powder
"It goes so quickly," she says.
She is saying something about the moon, and the young man driving hears her voice but is not listening. The night is dark and beautiful. They are heading to the coast, driving on a long, low bridge across the water, the car gently rocking. It is hurricane season, and he can feel the weather building somewhere out there.
She has skin like powder. It is pale white and soft, so soft it feels like it rubs off in his fingers when he touches her. They meet in college. It is 1989. She loves him unconditionally. He knows she is beautiful, but he does not find her physically attractive. He falls in love with her happiness when they meet at a party.
She is bubbly and laughing.
There is a group playing an ice-breaker game and she is asked to name a food that best describes her and why, and she says, "Spaghetti. It's fun to eat!" Then she realizes what she said and doubles over laughing.
Each day over the next two years she laughs less. He later wonders if his sadness rubs away her happiness. In the end, her anger turns to violent rage. She tells him she wants to marry and have his children. He loves her deeply, but deep inside he is afraid he might not be faithful. He tells her he cannot marry her. She is furious.
Over the years, he comes back to her many times. Later in life, he marries and divorces her. She will have many names. She is his college girlfriend and his ex-wife and an escort and drug addict. The best and the worst. Always the same and yet different. She is each of these and none of these.
He is in and out of dreams and visions. He cannot stop them coming. They are words and songs and poems and scenes. When he writes them down he writes imperfectly. So he writes them over and over. Then cuts away the extra words, cuts way his ego, until there is nothing but truth.
When his wife is jealous of his poems, he throws them away, but not before committing them to memory. He says them aloud whenever he is driving. And he doesn't know it yet, but the words and dreams have kept him alive.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“There’s nothing like that water,” he says. Highway 60 stretches out before us in the Texas heat. “It’s way down deep in the ground, keepin cool.”
He is an old man. I do not know his name, but he is familiar. His voice is hoarse like my grandfather’s. His boots brush the asphalt as we walk.
It feels like midday. Sweat trickles down my back. Around us, the earth is sectioned in great patchworks of cracks in the dust. The horizon is tan and brown and purple and shimmers silver blue like there is a wide lake with low hills a few miles ahead.
His hat is light and crisp with a wide brim, shading his eyes.
“It is out there. Clear and true.” He turns and looks me full in the face I see his eyes are a crystal blue.
“If you can find it,” he says looking toward the horizon, “you can tap it for years.”
He glides ahead. I notice my legs are not moving fast enough, I can’t make them move. I look down and then back up, and he is gone.
I wake.
*
His father swinging. One, two, three four. One two HIT four.
And again. And again.
*
“It goes so quickly,” she says.
She is saying something about the moon, and the young man driving hears her voice but is not listening.
“The clouds turning,” she says, “and the light of the moon behind.”
They are driving across the water on their way to the coast. The car rocks gently.
“You can tell something is building.”
He nods slowly. He is listening to the rhythm of tires going over seams in the pavement.
She has skin like powder.
He falls in love with her just after sunset. Fireflies blink near the trees. She catches one in her hands and says a rhyme.
Hold her up and watch her glow
Just a moment, let her go.
He tries it himself.
"Hold her gently," she says. "If you hold too tight, her fairy dust rubs off in your fingers. And it is beautiful for just a moment, but she will die."
He watches her catch and let go. Catch and let go. She is laughing. It is then he knows she is magic.
That summer they break up and he misses her deeply. He writes,
Last night I think I dreamt
that I went sinking
slowly resting
in the black water of the ocean
that rolled me over.
And I breathed that hollow water
that was closing
me down deep
relaxing in black cool.
Above I saw the shimmer of the moon on it shining
thin-milk pale
and blurring
empty moon
on empty water,
and I thought how easy it would be
staying down there
nebulous
and unthinkable.
So, I will wait
until the evening
when I can fill it up again with cool beer
and swim in the mirage of
dreamy smiles
and white teeth
and voices that laugh like yours
until the morning
when I am empty again
and missing you
and missing me.
She consoles herself with one of his best friends overnight at a hotel. The friend confesses the next weekend during a night of drinking (though he says they did not sleep together), and he remembers that those who love him hurt him. He calls her late that night to tell her he is furious, and she says she is sorry and that she loves him, things just happened but she didn’t sleep with the friend. In his anger, he writes,
Every piece of ass has some shit in it.
When he sees her a few weeks later at a party, he puts aside his anger because he just wants to be close to her, and they make love that night on the mattress on the floor of his room. He knows he should pull out because he does not have protection, but it feels so good to be loved he does not.
The next morning, the stray kitten who adopted the house comes into his room and they play with it from beneath the sheets. She loves cats. He is allergic. When his eyes puff up and start tearing, she asks, “Are you crying?”
“No, he says. "But I love you, I can’t be with you.”
She says, “I know. I love you too,” and they part ways knowing they will not be together as a couple.
The next weekend he goes to Virginia Beach for a retirement party for the father of one of his roommates. It is a backyard cookout in a cul-de-sac on the salt creek, with low houses and boat docks across the way and a long view of the marsh toward the ocean. He slips away from the party and walks to the water as the sun is setting. That’s when he sees it coming toward him.
A snowy egret, powdery and small. Gliding down the creek, silent and pale gray-white in the dimming light. It makes no sound, no movement as it passes maybe twenty feet from him standing there on the dock, transfixed. Neck pulled back in flight. Black beak sharp. Cold eye dark and fierce. It looks at him and into him and through him all at once, as if it fully understands and knows him, and he is insignificant. The wide wings lilt. Silent. The air has chilled. Small, ghost-white almost translucent. Just hanging there in the thin of the air. The angel of death passing quietly toward the sea.
A month later she will tell him she is pregnant.
*
“It goes so quickly,” she says. "You can tell something is building."
He nods slowly. The car gently rocking.
He is listening to the music and the rhythm of the tires going over seams in the pavement. Thump-thump. He likes that sound.
When he was growing up his family traveled every summer. His father was a preacher and they traveled to churches across the South. Drove all night to get to the next town. He curled up in the floor of the back seat with his brothers and sisters around, his head near the floorboards listening to that sound, his dad driving. The car is warm, he goes to sleep.
Thump-thump.
He wakes. It is late at night. They are crossing a bridge with lights overhead. Crossing over water. They are in a new city.
They move from the Texas panhandle to Hampton, Virginia, when he is seven, and they are the second Perez in the local phonebook.
He loves driving. It takes him away. He loves to think.
*
[to my brothers and sisters]
We grow up knowing we are different, you and I.
We are not like “normal” kids.
Normal kids live in ranch-style houses
set back on the country roads we drive on Sundays to church.
Normal kids don’t go to church Sunday morning,
Sunday night and
Wednesday night.
Normal kids probably spend Sundays watching television,
because normal kids have TV.
Or they play in yards big and wide and green,
lawns so large their dads cut the grass on riding mowers,
big enough to play a full game of football
or soccer,
or just run.
Normal kids’ houses have wide driveways with basketball goals
where they probably play with their buddies,
lots of friends,
happy kids.
Normal kids smile a lot, light eyes,
freckles on sharp noses,
and their skin is not tan or brown like ours.
Normal kids have simple, strong
American names
that no teacher ever asks them to spell.
Normal kids can afford to buy their lunch at school every day.
In fact, they only bring their lunch from home
on cold winter days
when they have a brand-new Thermos
full of hot Spaghettios.
Normal kids eat name-brand foods like Spaghettios
or maybe Cheerios,
not “Toasty Os.”
They don’t eat peanut-butter-and-jelly from a brown paper bag.
And they don’t eat beans and rice every night.
Normal kids have more than one pair of shoes,
and their toes are not stunted from wearing them all year round
even when they’ve outgrown them
to school, to church, on the playground, in the street.
Normal kids don’t get their clothes from older brothers and sisters.
They buy their clothes from the mall.
And they have more than two pairs of jeans and three shirts
to alternate throughout the week.
But we can’t have that. We don’t do that. We aren’t like that.
Because we are different.
We are poor.
We are Christian.
We are Mexican American.
And to the parents of normal kids, we are “minorities.”
But there is one place we start even with normal kids.
At the starting line, on the playground.
We run the same distance,
throw the same ball,
shoot at the same goal as normal kids.
And normal kids are not great at sports. But we are.
We can beat them running or in football or basketball or soccer.
We are faster and tougher.
Because we play every day
against other kids who are not normal,
and against our cousins and big brothers and sisters.
And they kick our ass.
When we play, we play longer and harder.
We even practice for practice
so we can run faster,
shoot better,
throw and kick farther.
We will win.
And at first, we think winning is a way for normal kids to like us.
But later we realize the reason we win is
deep down normal kids know they are normal
and they are content with that.
But you and I are always hungry,
and we are never content with that
and the only way for us to get what normal kids have
is to be better than them at everything.
And yes, make no mistake about it
because we are not normal
you and I
we will kick their ass.
*
His parents do not allow him to play organized football, even though it is his favorite sport. They say it is too violent, they don’t want him to get hurt. He and his brother are two of the best athletes in the neighborhood, and they excel in soccer, basketball, baseball and even games of tackle football with friends on the playground.
In his junior year of high school, he tries out to be the kicker for the football team without telling his parents. The night before his first game, he comes home and tells them.
"If you guys aren't doing anything tomorrow night, I have a game at City Stadium, 7:30."
"City Stadium?" says his mom, coming out of the kitchen. "What game? It's not soccer season. It's not basketball or baseball season." Wipes her hands on a dish towel.
"I'm playing football," he says.
"You're not playing football," say his mom.
His dad gets up from the table.
"Yes I am," he says. "I am the starting kicker on the football team, and we have a game tomorrow night. If you guys aren't doing anything, I hope you can come."
"You won the starting job?!" says his big sister. "Yeah!" Hugs and high-fives from his brothers and sisters.
"You're not going to get hurt, are you?" says his mom.
"Not if I hit them first," he says.
He spends the rest of his life running.
*
It is in college he realizes he is a writer. He is studying English at a liberal arts school in Virginia where he has earned a half scholarship to be the kicker on the football team. Every night, he huddles in the basement of the college library listening to jazz on the school’s new CD player. He puts on headphones, slides the Verve Silver Collection into the machine, pushes the button and hears for the first time Louis Armstrong's low, gravelly breath breathing sadness into the trumpet, mourning Stormy Weather, Have You Met Miss Jones, I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues, Home, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. He listens over and over. And the words start coming.
Thank you, Louie
for that thoughtful
soulful
way
down low
way
you do it, slow
lilting
like leaves
in river eddies
lips cupped
toward gray skies rolling.
I want to write it the way you sing it
give a damn about that
low gray
slow way
you sing it
see it
say it
won't you say it for me
because it is killing.
My window shows the river
with its barges, bridges
lights at dusk blinking on
into nightlife in the city
wide awake and listening
for that something
somewhere
save me somehow.
Go find me west of the moon.
With your sweat-tears
tell me
it's not all over
tell me
I've got something real
way down here in this bottom
of nothing
take me
where sun rises
with the smell of bread baking warm,
where mother finds me sleeping
tousles my hair and covers me
till I wake
from dreams of daylight
into daylight.
He takes a writing class - a seminar with a professor from the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop. It is the first time anyone has ever taken his writing seriously. The first time anyone reads his work and tries to understand what the words are saying without judging him.
He remembers his professor, a tall man folded into in a student desk and hunched over the text of a manuscript as if to discern the meaning of each word and the spaces between words.
"Listen to the voice," says the professor. "Listen to the voice. It is not you. It is the voice of your character.
"Write it down. Write it over and over and over. Your ego will get in the way, so you will have to cut and cut and cut away everything that is not the voice, everything that is you.
"Cut away your ego. And all you will have left - if it is any good - will be truth. That is all that matters."
Cut away your ego. And you will have truth. It is natural. He has been cutting away himself his whole life. The professor becomes his academic advisor. They will remain friends and reconnect when he comes back to writing years later.
He reads Hemingway for the first time in freshman seminar, reads Hills Like White Elephants and is struck by the simple beauty of the dialogue. Dialogue that says nothing, yet everything. Plain words and narrative, but complex depth. He thinks Fenimore Cooper is a blowhard, taking several pages to describe riding in a wagon over the prairie. He loves the cadences and imagery and everyday miracles of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
During this time he begins dreaming of walking in the desert with his grandfather or god or an old man he does not know, looking for water. His grandfather tells him stories of his Mexican heritage. He dreams it over and over.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“There’s nothing like that water,” he says.
Highway 60 stretches out before us in the Texas heat. It is midday.
“Just way down deep in the ground keeping cool,” he says.
He is an old man. His voice is hoarse like my Grandfather Lázaro’s – but I do not know him. His hat is light and crisp with a wide brim that shades his face, and the back of his neck is red from the sun but he is not sweating. I feel the trickle of perspiration down my back.
His boots are light on the pavement as we walk. He is just ahead.
The earth is a great patchwork of cracks in the dry-caked dust upon dust.
The horizon is purple and brown and shimmers silver blue like there’s a lake with hills a few miles ahead.
It is late afternoon when your great grandmother Ildefonsa Collado, barely eighteen, meets her husband Santos at the door of their hut holding his shotgun.
He is coming back from two days of drinking. She has heard him crashing through the trees on his horse.
He stops when he sees her standing, shotgun leveled. He reels atop his horse, legs bloody from riding through the brush.
"You will not come in," she says. "If you try, you will die.
"Go now and sleep it off. Make peace with God and you can come home. But if you ever touch me or the children again, I will surely kill you. Dios me ayuda."
So Santos wheels cursing, almost falling off his horse, goes and sleeps on a pew in the Catholic church. The next morning he confesses to the priest, gives up drinking and goes home.
For the next six months, Ildefonsa sleeps with the shotgun in the middle of their bed.
"If anything happens," she says, "at least one of us will end it quickly."
“I don't know why you are telling me this," I say.
"Some people search and never find it. But it is here. Clear and true,” he says.
He turns and looks me full in the face I see his eyes are crystal blue. He looks back to the horizon.
"If you find it," he says, "you can tap it for years."
"You can tap it for years."
*
She has skin like powder.
“We will be there shortly,” he says.
He drives her to the clinic in another town because she does not want to see anyone she knows. They go the first day, she has an exam, takes a pill, and they go back again the next day for the procedure.
In the waiting room he avoids eye contact with a few others waiting, tries to read the paper, magazines, tries to do anything.
He sits on the sofa, a drab 1970s-style yellow and brown plaid next to a large window with sunlight pouring onto the spot where he sits. Even though the air conditioning is on, he feels warm and sleepy as if there is a blanket of haze coming over his head. He cannot keep his eyes open.
It had been that way during the prior weeks when they made the decision. He seemed to fall into a deep sleep and wake hours later just as tired, then eat and sleep again. He later wonders if subconsciously he wanted to escape and sleep away the time until it was over, like Jack Burden in All the King's Men.
He wakes when the nurse shakes him and says Powder is coming out. She is in a wheelchair. They wheel her out to the car, and he helps her into the passenger seat and gives her a pillow. She is groggy and starts crying. They stop at a gas station along the way, so she can lean out the door and throw up. When they get home, he puts her in bed lays beside her, tries to think about nothing.
He wakes in the middle of the night when she goes to the bathroom and he hears her wailing uncontrollably, finds her weeping on the floor, sitting in a small puddle of lumpy blood. She is inconsolable.
"I didn't want to kill it," she is saying.
They had said it would be like this. He cleans her up and helps her back to bed. Then finishes cleaning the floor. Flushes the blood and tissue.
She cries and sleeps, sleeps and cries for the next two weeks. He brings her tea and soup and stays with her. He tells her he loves her because it is honest and true. She asks him to stay for a while. He holds her while she sleeps.
The words come quietly.
She came back on hard gravel.
The road she walked was hot and dusty.
She cooled beneath the shade of a large green tree,
sat beneath blue sky
and white clouds
on green grass
and the wind lifted branches
and as she drifted dreamily thought she heard
the lightness of leaves
lilting in the breeze
with the wind in branches
all whispering hush,
hush.
Hush baby and the wind will hold you.
Hush baby and the wind will heal you.
My baby let the wind take you up in its leafy branches
tell you
nothing of the pain but coolness
softness,
and the weight of your shoulders,
and the aching in your heartbeat
will lean way, way over
in boughs and branches
but will not break.
You will not break you.
Hush softly.
They stay together for the next month. Her health returns, as does her rage, which grows deeper. She says she will never forgive him. Says it is all his fault. Deep inside he believes it too. When she hits him, he puts his arms around her and holds on until she stops and falls asleep. Holds her every night when she sleeps. And in his heart the words continue.
for I will be a different kind of tree
I will plant me alone
where I will flourish in the sun
green on a hill
near the stream
where waters run
and run
and run
and I will live forever the sun
And in the morning, when she wakes he will tell her he is yet alive and will be leaving.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“What is it that you long for? What do you dream of?"
Si algo pidieres. Si algo pidieres.
*
"It goes so quickly," she says." It is night. They are driving.
He is listening to the sound of tires on pavement and the music and the words that he can't stop coming.
There is a man running beside my car as I drive.
I have never seen him.
Sometimes I catch him in the corner of my eye
but he is fleeting.
I see the shadows of his long legs running
in furrows of fields I pass by
deep brown loam
cool to the touch
when you kneel
and smell it
hold it in your fist
that’s when you hear the whispers
it is in you
can you feel it
as real as this dirt
it is deep within
But I don’t stop driving.
When I drive through woods
he runs from tree to tree.
When I turn to look
he stops in shadows so I cannot see.
And I do not know who he is
or why he chases
me.
*
When Powder dies that fall, he finds out through mutual friends.
“Sorry to hear,” says the message. “Hope you’re okay.”
She was drinking with friends and it was just a few pills. It was her first time. But the mix of pills with her prescription was lethal. She fell asleep across the bed wearing only her panties and did not wake.
He goes to the funeral and sits in the back. It is a graveside service, a brilliant autumn afternoon, the trees just turning gold and red. He wears dark glasses, tries not to notice anyone, though he wants to be with everyone.
"She was an angel to all who knew her," the minister is saying.
"The Psalmist says
He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul
restores my soul and leads me
still the waters run
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death
I walk in shadows
I shall not fear, for thou art with me
My cup runneth over.
my cup runs over
still, the water
still, the water
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.
Surely goodness. Surely goodness and mercy."
He cannot listen. He looks up. High in the sky there is a tiny silver airplane way up there in blue above. Bloated in the belly and shining in the waning sunlight. Thin vapor trail. He hears the words come quick and cutting.
for I am the angel of death slowly passing.
Do not fall in love with me. I will surely kill you.
I have no feelings. Though I am honest and true
I am quiet death to you.
He breaks. Looks down at his hands. And just for a moment he thinks it looks like fairy dust.
Algonkian Pre-event Narrative Enhancement Guide - Opening Hook
in Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Posted
*
the time i try to run
you hold me down
i am seven or eight years old
get up to run to my room
can't stop crying
stay here you say
your arm around me
when i resist you use both arms
stay here you say
just stay
i’m hyperventilating
though i don't know that word yet
can't breathe
can't move
you are too strong for me to go
but in between breaths i find
there is a space
inside your arms
against your side
it is the space between bars of a cage
it is the air between branches
of closely planted trees
but if i make myself small
and thin
and still
i just might fit
if i shallow
my breath
and wait
and wait
i can make room for myself in here
if i shrink and slow my breathing
there is a place i make inside
inside your arms
and deep inside of me
and that is where i go and hide
you hold me
that is where i stay and calm
you pray
say you love me
and this is how i learn love is this way
those who love me hurt me
but everything will be okay
if i just
stay
and shrink
and learn to live without
breathing
deeply
that night I dream of running through trees
I. Skin Like Powder
"It goes so quickly," she says.
She is saying something about the moon, and the young man driving hears her voice but is not listening. The night is dark and beautiful. They are heading to the coast, driving on a long, low bridge across the water, the car gently rocking. It is hurricane season, and he can feel the weather building somewhere out there.
She has skin like powder. It is pale white and soft, so soft it feels like it rubs off in his fingers when he touches her. They meet in college. It is 1989. She loves him unconditionally. He knows she is beautiful, but he does not find her physically attractive. He falls in love with her happiness when they meet at a party.
She is bubbly and laughing.
There is a group playing an ice-breaker game and she is asked to name a food that best describes her and why, and she says, "Spaghetti. It's fun to eat!" Then she realizes what she said and doubles over laughing.
Each day over the next two years she laughs less. He later wonders if his sadness rubs away her happiness. In the end, her anger turns to violent rage. She tells him she wants to marry and have his children. He loves her deeply, but deep inside he is afraid he might not be faithful. He tells her he cannot marry her. She is furious.
Over the years, he comes back to her many times. Later in life, he marries and divorces her. She will have many names. She is his college girlfriend and his ex-wife and an escort and drug addict. The best and the worst. Always the same and yet different. She is each of these and none of these.
He is in and out of dreams and visions. He cannot stop them coming. They are words and songs and poems and scenes. When he writes them down he writes imperfectly. So he writes them over and over. Then cuts away the extra words, cuts way his ego, until there is nothing but truth.
When his wife is jealous of his poems, he throws them away, but not before committing them to memory. He says them aloud whenever he is driving. And he doesn't know it yet, but the words and dreams have kept him alive.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“There’s nothing like that water,” he says. Highway 60 stretches out before us in the Texas heat. “It’s way down deep in the ground, keepin cool.”
He is an old man. I do not know his name, but he is familiar. His voice is hoarse like my grandfather’s. His boots brush the asphalt as we walk.
It feels like midday. Sweat trickles down my back. Around us, the earth is sectioned in great patchworks of cracks in the dust. The horizon is tan and brown and purple and shimmers silver blue like there is a wide lake with low hills a few miles ahead.
His hat is light and crisp with a wide brim, shading his eyes.
“It is out there. Clear and true.” He turns and looks me full in the face I see his eyes are a crystal blue.
“If you can find it,” he says looking toward the horizon, “you can tap it for years.”
He glides ahead. I notice my legs are not moving fast enough, I can’t make them move. I look down and then back up, and he is gone.
I wake.
*
His father swinging. One, two, three four. One two HIT four.
And again. And again.
*
“It goes so quickly,” she says.
She is saying something about the moon, and the young man driving hears her voice but is not listening.
“The clouds turning,” she says, “and the light of the moon behind.”
They are driving across the water on their way to the coast. The car rocks gently.
“You can tell something is building.”
He nods slowly. He is listening to the rhythm of tires going over seams in the pavement.
She has skin like powder.
He falls in love with her just after sunset. Fireflies blink near the trees. She catches one in her hands and says a rhyme.
Hold her up and watch her glow
Just a moment, let her go.
He tries it himself.
"Hold her gently," she says. "If you hold too tight, her fairy dust rubs off in your fingers. And it is beautiful for just a moment, but she will die."
He watches her catch and let go. Catch and let go. She is laughing. It is then he knows she is magic.
That summer they break up and he misses her deeply. He writes,
Last night I think I dreamt
that I went sinking
slowly resting
in the black water of the ocean
that rolled me over.
And I breathed that hollow water
that was closing
me down deep
relaxing in black cool.
Above I saw the shimmer of the moon on it shining
thin-milk pale
and blurring
empty moon
on empty water,
and I thought how easy it would be
staying down there
nebulous
and unthinkable.
So, I will wait
until the evening
when I can fill it up again with cool beer
and swim in the mirage of
dreamy smiles
and white teeth
and voices that laugh like yours
until the morning
when I am empty again
and missing you
and missing me.
She consoles herself with one of his best friends overnight at a hotel. The friend confesses the next weekend during a night of drinking (though he says they did not sleep together), and he remembers that those who love him hurt him. He calls her late that night to tell her he is furious, and she says she is sorry and that she loves him, things just happened but she didn’t sleep with the friend. In his anger, he writes,
Every piece of ass has some shit in it.
When he sees her a few weeks later at a party, he puts aside his anger because he just wants to be close to her, and they make love that night on the mattress on the floor of his room. He knows he should pull out because he does not have protection, but it feels so good to be loved he does not.
The next morning, the stray kitten who adopted the house comes into his room and they play with it from beneath the sheets. She loves cats. He is allergic. When his eyes puff up and start tearing, she asks, “Are you crying?”
“No, he says. "But I love you, I can’t be with you.”
She says, “I know. I love you too,” and they part ways knowing they will not be together as a couple.
The next weekend he goes to Virginia Beach for a retirement party for the father of one of his roommates. It is a backyard cookout in a cul-de-sac on the salt creek, with low houses and boat docks across the way and a long view of the marsh toward the ocean. He slips away from the party and walks to the water as the sun is setting. That’s when he sees it coming toward him.
A snowy egret, powdery and small. Gliding down the creek, silent and pale gray-white in the dimming light. It makes no sound, no movement as it passes maybe twenty feet from him standing there on the dock, transfixed. Neck pulled back in flight. Black beak sharp. Cold eye dark and fierce. It looks at him and into him and through him all at once, as if it fully understands and knows him, and he is insignificant. The wide wings lilt. Silent. The air has chilled. Small, ghost-white almost translucent. Just hanging there in the thin of the air. The angel of death passing quietly toward the sea.
A month later she will tell him she is pregnant.
*
“It goes so quickly,” she says. "You can tell something is building."
He nods slowly. The car gently rocking.
He is listening to the music and the rhythm of the tires going over seams in the pavement. Thump-thump. He likes that sound.
When he was growing up his family traveled every summer. His father was a preacher and they traveled to churches across the South. Drove all night to get to the next town. He curled up in the floor of the back seat with his brothers and sisters around, his head near the floorboards listening to that sound, his dad driving. The car is warm, he goes to sleep.
Thump-thump.
He wakes. It is late at night. They are crossing a bridge with lights overhead. Crossing over water. They are in a new city.
They move from the Texas panhandle to Hampton, Virginia, when he is seven, and they are the second Perez in the local phonebook.
He loves driving. It takes him away. He loves to think.
*
[to my brothers and sisters]
We grow up knowing we are different, you and I.
We are not like “normal” kids.
Normal kids live in ranch-style houses
set back on the country roads we drive on Sundays to church.
Normal kids don’t go to church Sunday morning,
Sunday night and
Wednesday night.
Normal kids probably spend Sundays watching television,
because normal kids have TV.
Or they play in yards big and wide and green,
lawns so large their dads cut the grass on riding mowers,
big enough to play a full game of football
or soccer,
or just run.
Normal kids’ houses have wide driveways with basketball goals
where they probably play with their buddies,
lots of friends,
happy kids.
Normal kids smile a lot, light eyes,
freckles on sharp noses,
and their skin is not tan or brown like ours.
Normal kids have simple, strong
American names
that no teacher ever asks them to spell.
Normal kids can afford to buy their lunch at school every day.
In fact, they only bring their lunch from home
on cold winter days
when they have a brand-new Thermos
full of hot Spaghettios.
Normal kids eat name-brand foods like Spaghettios
or maybe Cheerios,
not “Toasty Os.”
They don’t eat peanut-butter-and-jelly from a brown paper bag.
And they don’t eat beans and rice every night.
Normal kids have more than one pair of shoes,
and their toes are not stunted from wearing them all year round
even when they’ve outgrown them
to school, to church, on the playground, in the street.
Normal kids don’t get their clothes from older brothers and sisters.
They buy their clothes from the mall.
And they have more than two pairs of jeans and three shirts
to alternate throughout the week.
But we can’t have that. We don’t do that. We aren’t like that.
Because we are different.
We are poor.
We are Christian.
We are Mexican American.
And to the parents of normal kids, we are “minorities.”
But there is one place we start even with normal kids.
At the starting line, on the playground.
We run the same distance,
throw the same ball,
shoot at the same goal as normal kids.
And normal kids are not great at sports. But we are.
We can beat them running or in football or basketball or soccer.
We are faster and tougher.
Because we play every day
against other kids who are not normal,
and against our cousins and big brothers and sisters.
And they kick our ass.
When we play, we play longer and harder.
We even practice for practice
so we can run faster,
shoot better,
throw and kick farther.
We will win.
And at first, we think winning is a way for normal kids to like us.
But later we realize the reason we win is
deep down normal kids know they are normal
and they are content with that.
But you and I are always hungry,
and we are never content with that
and the only way for us to get what normal kids have
is to be better than them at everything.
And yes, make no mistake about it
because we are not normal
you and I
we will kick their ass.
*
His parents do not allow him to play organized football, even though it is his favorite sport. They say it is too violent, they don’t want him to get hurt. He and his brother are two of the best athletes in the neighborhood, and they excel in soccer, basketball, baseball and even games of tackle football with friends on the playground.
In his junior year of high school, he tries out to be the kicker for the football team without telling his parents. The night before his first game, he comes home and tells them.
"If you guys aren't doing anything tomorrow night, I have a game at City Stadium, 7:30."
"City Stadium?" says his mom, coming out of the kitchen. "What game? It's not soccer season. It's not basketball or baseball season." Wipes her hands on a dish towel.
"I'm playing football," he says.
"You're not playing football," say his mom.
His dad gets up from the table.
"Yes I am," he says. "I am the starting kicker on the football team, and we have a game tomorrow night. If you guys aren't doing anything, I hope you can come."
"You won the starting job?!" says his big sister. "Yeah!" Hugs and high-fives from his brothers and sisters.
"You're not going to get hurt, are you?" says his mom.
"Not if I hit them first," he says.
He spends the rest of his life running.
*
It is in college he realizes he is a writer. He is studying English at a liberal arts school in Virginia where he has earned a half scholarship to be the kicker on the football team. Every night, he huddles in the basement of the college library listening to jazz on the school’s new CD player. He puts on headphones, slides the Verve Silver Collection into the machine, pushes the button and hears for the first time Louis Armstrong's low, gravelly breath breathing sadness into the trumpet, mourning Stormy Weather, Have You Met Miss Jones, I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues, Home, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. He listens over and over. And the words start coming.
Thank you, Louie
for that thoughtful
soulful
way
down low
way
you do it, slow
lilting
like leaves
in river eddies
lips cupped
toward gray skies rolling.
I want to write it the way you sing it
give a damn about that
low gray
slow way
you sing it
see it
say it
won't you say it for me
because it is killing.
My window shows the river
with its barges, bridges
lights at dusk blinking on
into nightlife in the city
wide awake and listening
for that something
somewhere
save me somehow.
Go find me west of the moon.
With your sweat-tears
tell me
it's not all over
tell me
I've got something real
way down here in this bottom
of nothing
take me
where sun rises
with the smell of bread baking warm,
where mother finds me sleeping
tousles my hair and covers me
till I wake
from dreams of daylight
into daylight.
He takes a writing class - a seminar with a professor from the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop. It is the first time anyone has ever taken his writing seriously. The first time anyone reads his work and tries to understand what the words are saying without judging him.
He remembers his professor, a tall man folded into in a student desk and hunched over the text of a manuscript as if to discern the meaning of each word and the spaces between words.
"Listen to the voice," says the professor. "Listen to the voice. It is not you. It is the voice of your character.
"Write it down. Write it over and over and over. Your ego will get in the way, so you will have to cut and cut and cut away everything that is not the voice, everything that is you.
"Cut away your ego. And all you will have left - if it is any good - will be truth. That is all that matters."
Cut away your ego. And you will have truth. It is natural. He has been cutting away himself his whole life. The professor becomes his academic advisor. They will remain friends and reconnect when he comes back to writing years later.
He reads Hemingway for the first time in freshman seminar, reads Hills Like White Elephants and is struck by the simple beauty of the dialogue. Dialogue that says nothing, yet everything. Plain words and narrative, but complex depth. He thinks Fenimore Cooper is a blowhard, taking several pages to describe riding in a wagon over the prairie. He loves the cadences and imagery and everyday miracles of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
During this time he begins dreaming of walking in the desert with his grandfather or god or an old man he does not know, looking for water. His grandfather tells him stories of his Mexican heritage. He dreams it over and over.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“There’s nothing like that water,” he says.
Highway 60 stretches out before us in the Texas heat. It is midday.
“Just way down deep in the ground keeping cool,” he says.
He is an old man. His voice is hoarse like my Grandfather Lázaro’s – but I do not know him. His hat is light and crisp with a wide brim that shades his face, and the back of his neck is red from the sun but he is not sweating. I feel the trickle of perspiration down my back.
His boots are light on the pavement as we walk. He is just ahead.
The earth is a great patchwork of cracks in the dry-caked dust upon dust.
The horizon is purple and brown and shimmers silver blue like there’s a lake with hills a few miles ahead.
It is late afternoon when your great grandmother Ildefonsa Collado, barely eighteen, meets her husband Santos at the door of their hut holding his shotgun.
He is coming back from two days of drinking. She has heard him crashing through the trees on his horse.
He stops when he sees her standing, shotgun leveled. He reels atop his horse, legs bloody from riding through the brush.
"You will not come in," she says. "If you try, you will die.
"Go now and sleep it off. Make peace with God and you can come home. But if you ever touch me or the children again, I will surely kill you. Dios me ayuda."
So Santos wheels cursing, almost falling off his horse, goes and sleeps on a pew in the Catholic church. The next morning he confesses to the priest, gives up drinking and goes home.
For the next six months, Ildefonsa sleeps with the shotgun in the middle of their bed.
"If anything happens," she says, "at least one of us will end it quickly."
“I don't know why you are telling me this," I say.
"Some people search and never find it. But it is here. Clear and true,” he says.
He turns and looks me full in the face I see his eyes are crystal blue. He looks back to the horizon.
"If you find it," he says, "you can tap it for years."
"You can tap it for years."
*
She has skin like powder.
“We will be there shortly,” he says.
He drives her to the clinic in another town because she does not want to see anyone she knows. They go the first day, she has an exam, takes a pill, and they go back again the next day for the procedure.
In the waiting room he avoids eye contact with a few others waiting, tries to read the paper, magazines, tries to do anything.
He sits on the sofa, a drab 1970s-style yellow and brown plaid next to a large window with sunlight pouring onto the spot where he sits. Even though the air conditioning is on, he feels warm and sleepy as if there is a blanket of haze coming over his head. He cannot keep his eyes open.
It had been that way during the prior weeks when they made the decision. He seemed to fall into a deep sleep and wake hours later just as tired, then eat and sleep again. He later wonders if subconsciously he wanted to escape and sleep away the time until it was over, like Jack Burden in All the King's Men.
He wakes when the nurse shakes him and says Powder is coming out. She is in a wheelchair. They wheel her out to the car, and he helps her into the passenger seat and gives her a pillow. She is groggy and starts crying. They stop at a gas station along the way, so she can lean out the door and throw up. When they get home, he puts her in bed lays beside her, tries to think about nothing.
He wakes in the middle of the night when she goes to the bathroom and he hears her wailing uncontrollably, finds her weeping on the floor, sitting in a small puddle of lumpy blood. She is inconsolable.
"I didn't want to kill it," she is saying.
They had said it would be like this. He cleans her up and helps her back to bed. Then finishes cleaning the floor. Flushes the blood and tissue.
She cries and sleeps, sleeps and cries for the next two weeks. He brings her tea and soup and stays with her. He tells her he loves her because it is honest and true. She asks him to stay for a while. He holds her while she sleeps.
The words come quietly.
She came back on hard gravel.
The road she walked was hot and dusty.
She cooled beneath the shade of a large green tree,
sat beneath blue sky
and white clouds
on green grass
and the wind lifted branches
and as she drifted dreamily thought she heard
the lightness of leaves
lilting in the breeze
with the wind in branches
all whispering hush,
hush.
Hush baby and the wind will hold you.
Hush baby and the wind will heal you.
My baby let the wind take you up in its leafy branches
tell you
nothing of the pain but coolness
softness,
and the weight of your shoulders,
and the aching in your heartbeat
will lean way, way over
in boughs and branches
but will not break.
You will not break you.
Hush softly.
They stay together for the next month. Her health returns, as does her rage, which grows deeper. She says she will never forgive him. Says it is all his fault. Deep inside he believes it too. When she hits him, he puts his arms around her and holds on until she stops and falls asleep. Holds her every night when she sleeps. And in his heart the words continue.
for I will be a different kind of tree
I will plant me alone
where I will flourish in the sun
green on a hill
near the stream
where waters run
and run
and run
and I will live forever the sun
And in the morning, when she wakes he will tell her he is yet alive and will be leaving.
*
It is hot. We are walking.
“What is it that you long for? What do you dream of?"
Si algo pidieres. Si algo pidieres.
*
"It goes so quickly," she says." It is night. They are driving.
He is listening to the sound of tires on pavement and the music and the words that he can't stop coming.
There is a man running beside my car as I drive.
I have never seen him.
Sometimes I catch him in the corner of my eye
but he is fleeting.
I see the shadows of his long legs running
in furrows of fields I pass by
deep brown loam
cool to the touch
when you kneel
and smell it
hold it in your fist
that’s when you hear the whispers
it is in you
can you feel it
as real as this dirt
it is deep within
But I don’t stop driving.
When I drive through woods
he runs from tree to tree.
When I turn to look
he stops in shadows so I cannot see.
And I do not know who he is
or why he chases
me.
*
When Powder dies that fall, he finds out through mutual friends.
“Sorry to hear,” says the message. “Hope you’re okay.”
She was drinking with friends and it was just a few pills. It was her first time. But the mix of pills with her prescription was lethal. She fell asleep across the bed wearing only her panties and did not wake.
He goes to the funeral and sits in the back. It is a graveside service, a brilliant autumn afternoon, the trees just turning gold and red. He wears dark glasses, tries not to notice anyone, though he wants to be with everyone.
"She was an angel to all who knew her," the minister is saying.
"The Psalmist says
He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul
restores my soul and leads me
still the waters run
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death
I walk in shadows
I shall not fear, for thou art with me
My cup runneth over.
my cup runs over
still, the water
still, the water
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.
Surely goodness. Surely goodness and mercy."
He cannot listen. He looks up. High in the sky there is a tiny silver airplane way up there in blue above. Bloated in the belly and shining in the waning sunlight. Thin vapor trail. He hears the words come quick and cutting.
for I am the angel of death slowly passing.
Do not fall in love with me. I will surely kill you.
I have no feelings. Though I am honest and true
I am quiet death to you.
He breaks. Looks down at his hands. And just for a moment he thinks it looks like fairy dust.
Running Through Trees Novel v7 2025 08.docx