Parrot in the Oven by Victor Martinez

Author:Victor Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

8

Family Affair

The day we took Magda to the hospital, the wind against my ears sounded like sizzling, it was so cold. I remember tears of ice dripping from the trees and frozen pools clasping the blackened soil near the roots. My fingers felt like snapping off the bone when I opened and closed them. Across from the hospital was the bus stop made of mortared cinderblocks. When we got off the bus, a scrap of paper tumbled up the sidewalk and stuck on the wrought-iron gate of the hospital entrance.

We went to the hospital because Magda had come home crying with pain. She splashed vomit on the front step, and when she tried to rise, swooned and crashed against the screen door. Mom and I were in the kitchen. She was sewing a button on a shirt, and I was scraping the dirty moons under my fingernails. Mom jumped up right away and rushed out the door screaming in panic. Not knowing what the screaming was about, I thought something crazy had happened, like maybe some rabid dog had snuck into the kitchen or a giant rat poked its head out of a hole, two things of which I knew my mom was terrified. I dashed out behind her.

At first I thought Magda had gotten hit by a car. The crosswalk over by Walnut Street had no stop sign, and the street winds around a curve so sharp that cars boom down on you before you know it. But the way she was cramping and bundling her stomach, I thought it was food poisoning, like my aunt Letty, who came back from Mexico with amoebas. But Magda didn’t look stiff and glassy-eyed like I’d seen dogs that had been hit by a car look, and she wasn’t moaning in a way that showed amoebas had knotted her up. When I got close, I noticed a red carnation of blood blooming on the lap of her dress.

Mom had her suspicions. She pulled me over and told me to help drag Magda inside. Gossip had a way of spreading around the housing projects quicker than dry burning grass.

Mom’s suspicions proved right. Magda was losing a baby. Mom figured it out by the stiff way Magda clutched her belly which you could see was swollen even under the loose dress. Mom had lost two babies herself; one was born dead; the other birthed too early to start life complete, and died in the hospital incubator after only a couple of hours of sucking air. Mom said you could have put her little baby girl inside a shoebox, she was so tiny.

We dragged Magda, muscle stiff and clumsy, across the cement floor to the bathroom. She was hooking her fingers into tiny crevices in the air and whenever she whined, a menthol chill the size of a maple leaf touched on my neck.

It took some pulling to drag her to the bathroom, but as soon as we stopped, Mom said to me, “Get out!,” and grabbed my arm to shove me back through the door.

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