Apex Magazine: Issue 114, November 2018 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

* * *

2.

In the early days, Mega saved my life. That is, she saved my daughter’s life, and therefore mine, too.

The air is bad here. Sometimes it is so thick, it becomes visible—a blanket of particulates as warm and thick as fleece. Baby Girl has asthma and went into a full-blown incident on a 110-degree morning when she was a year old. The nebulizer’s battery had no juice left and public access booths were too far from Mole Street, so I carried her limp little body and the nebulizer bag through the neighborhood, screaming for help I knew would—could —not come.

I had crossed some three or four blocks from the Latino section of the neighborhood, into the Indonesian one, before I stopped. In those early days after Day Zero, we kept to the city’s historically segregated neighborhoods and didn’t associate much with each other, so when I heard a loud chugging, grinding sound, I didn’t know what to expect.

Certainly not the contraption that turned the corner and headed to where I stood. It was a hybrid go-kart/ATV struggling to drag a heavy trailer behind it. I caught my breath when I noticed there was a portable generator wedged in among the barrels on the rig.

The vehicle stopped right in front of me, and its driver—goggles, full-length hooded vest, and thin leather chaps scarred from burns—hopped down. She didn’t bother to say anything, just pulled the generator’s recoil several times, and once it kicked on, plugged the nebulizer into the generator. I broke open an albuterol ampoule I had traded a month’s chits to get and strapped the nebulizer mask over my daughter’s nose and mouth. Baby Girl coughed a couple of times, then closed her eyes and breathed.

“It’ll need to run some twenty minutes or so,” I said to the woman. “I know that means we will use a lot of your gas, but she’s got to have the full dose. I don’t have many chits to give you now, but I swear I will repay you in full.”

“I’m not worried about it,” she said as she pulled off her goggles. “We make our own biodiesel.” She indicated the barrels, “I was out collecting cooking oil when I heard your cries.”

She stuck out her hand. “I’m Mega.”

As we shook, she studied me. “You have the mark of a natural-born witch.”

The big mole on the side of my neck itched, as if it understood her words. “My skill is of the lowest order,” I said. “An aptitude for augury, only. Nothing as useful as healing.”

She chewed her lip (at the edge of which was the mole that marked her) for a bit, then seemed to arrive at a decision. “When we’re done here, I’m going to introduce you to someone whose talent is all healing, all the time. Because you can’t count on me being around whenever your daughter needs help.”

But that’s exactly what I’ve grown to do. I count on her and she counts on me, and that’s the way it is with all of the tías and aunties and bibis who coalesced into the Mole Street Mob.

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