The Fabulous Sinkhole and Other Stories by Jesús Salvador Treviño

Author:Jesús Salvador Treviño
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 1995-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

“I don’t hear a thing,” Smiley Rojas said, holding his cupped hands tightly together close to his right ear.

It was later in the afternoon, and the Sluggers had gathered around the large plastic trash cans in my back yard. I had told them about what Mrs. Romero had said about flies being our dead ancestors.

Reymundo and Choo Choo were playing catch, Jeannie, Bobby and Smiley were taking turns with Smiley’s new Hula-Hoop (the one he’d picked up at Mrs. Romero’s sinkhole), and the rest of us—Junior, Beto, myself and the Rodríguez twins—were sprawled out on the grassy knoll behind the trash cans. I was only half paying attention to the fly experiment because all I could think of was the upcoming graduation dance. I had been agonizing about it for weeks and still couldn’t think of a way out.

Smiley had spent the last ten minutes catching the fly which he now held in his hand and whose buzzing he was trying to interpret. We had decided to test out Mrs. Romero’s idea that flies were, in fact, our dead ancestors sent down to earth to warn us of something.

Smiley listened again and then shook his head, “Nope, not a thing.”

“So, just what’s it supposed to be saying?” Reymundo Salazar asked sarcastically, tossing the baseball to Choo Choo who caught it with one of the leather gloves that Reymundo had picked out of Mrs. Romero’s sinkhole.

“It can be saying anything,” I replied, brushing hair away from my mirrored sunglasses. I loved wearing them because nobody could see my eyes and they made me look like a gangster. Any little edge on the guys is always appreciated.

Anyway, I was really torn about this graduation-dance business. I wanted to go because I love dancing. But what I didn’t want to do was go through all the baloney of getting dressed up in a fancy dress. Most of all, I was determined that I wasn’t going to act like a dithering idiot, like all the other girls at school.

Smiley strained to hear something intelligible from the angry buzzing of the fly in his cupped hands. “Do they communicate in Spanish or in English?” he asked.

“Maybe it’s in Morse Code,” Jeannie said. “You know, each buzz a dot or a dash.” We had gotten to be better friends since my sliding-into-home base lessons, and I could see she was trying to back me up.

Junior Valdez pointed the weird space gun he had gotten from Mrs. Romero’s at Jeannie, then at Smiley, then at the rest of us. Then he said, “I’m not really a Mexican. I’m really from outer space. I’m only temporarily occupying the body of Junior Valdez in Arroyo Grande until my spacecraft can be repaired. Then I’ll return to the planet Zathar where I belong.”

Junior was like that, always saying something totally off the wall and bizarre when you least expected it. I told you he’s a real space nut!

“Here, let me listen,” I said, ignoring Junior. I reached over with cupped hands and Smiley carefully passed the buzzing fly to me.

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