15 Views of Miami by Jaquira Diaz

Author:Jaquira Diaz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SINKHOLE

M.J. Fievre

Little Haiti

When the earth opened up and swallowed her husband Jonah whole, Pica feared that her life and all its private lies would be exposed. Reporters from the Miami Herald and the Sun Sentinel swarmed her mother-in-law’s botánica, curious about the newly widowed Pica and the Little Haiti Man who’d been gulped down by the sinkhole. She tried to look devastated enough, but truth was she and Jonah had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for a while now. She’d considered leaving him, but her raven-haired Italian lover Bruno needed the money, and quite frankly Pica enjoyed being kept. Jonah had money in trust funds—lots of it—and Pica didn’t want to go back to waitressing at Le Bébé, the Haitian diner. Jonah hadn’t pushed for a divorce; he loved showing off his young and beautiful wife at banquets and fundraising galas, her body confident and tall, and she knew to hold him close in public and whisper in his ear as other investors drank martinis and referred to the neighborhood as Buena Vista, not Little Haiti, a name that brought images of dark-skinned boat people.

She’d spent that Thursday afternoon with Bruno while Jonah, recovering from allergies, took a nap in the claustrophobic, soon-to-sink master bedroom. Bruno and she drank Chianti and ate loaves of bread with imported French cheeses on the uneven wooden floor of his bare little flat behind the Little Haiti Cultural Center, read The Miami Times, fucked on his old pullout sofa under the big picture window, sunlight streaming in through the curtains, talked, and smoked Comme Il Faut cigarettes. They were a tangle of arms, legs, mouths, hands, and skin, and could not say where sex began and ended.

Pica felt womanly, testing the world for its possibilities. While Bruno pleasured her, she lost herself in his paintings, brilliant colors over dark tones, dashes of pure white paint, bright reds thickened with sand to build up textures.

*

She’d returned home just in time to hear the deafening noise and find Jonah’s room gone—his king-size bed, his mahogany dresser, his wide-screen TV. Pica jumped into the hole and frantically shoved away rubble with her bare hands, mapping in her mind the irises of Jonah’s eyes, the palms of his hands, the sound of his voice. She didn’t hear the police sirens; she didn’t feel the landslide pinning her body parts. Although it was as if her body was sinking into flames, she didn’t realize she was trapped waist-deep in rocks until a sheriff ’s deputy pulled her to safety, next to her mother-in-law, Philomena, a woman gone mad, hollering at the sky, blaming Pica, la bruja, for this tragedy. You don’t want a baby—and the baby dies. You don’t want my son—and the earth swallows him whole. Maybe Pica still smelled of sex. She’d wanted to shower, but in Bruno’s apartment the water was brown no matter how long you ran it.

Something rumbled the next street over and Pica thought: another sinkhole while she waited for the ground to crack and crumble.

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