Across the Wire by Luis Urrea

Author:Luis Urrea [Urrea, Luis Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77374-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

That night, back at the orphanage, a bright thing sat above the horizon, glowing like a fat copper star. It pulsed on and off, then vanished. When I looked again, it was back, drifting north. I felt like one of those UFO ladies on cable TV, wearing their foil caps, chanting the aliens down.

The children engaged in the tumultuous process called “ready for bed.” The oldest boy in the orphanage had the unenviable duty of foot patrol. He had to check all the orphans’ feet to make sure they were clean and didn’t get their beds stinky. When he found dirty feet, his wrath was understandably fearsome.

The kids were a little high: that day, the visitors had provided them with a piñata. One of the girls, an immensely fat kid named Carmen, paraded around announcing that she had collected exactly 182 pieces of candy. Several bruised and battered boys had made the sad mistake of trying to outrace her. She clutched the candies to her gut like the highest icons of the greed religion.

Suddenly, quiet.

Silence always descends like this in the back country. It’s like a curtain that drifts over the scene, and there is an instant peace. The sound of an old truck grunted up from the valley, and at my feet, a massive stinkbug: the sound could have been his engine, grinding through the gears.

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