We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? by Achy Obejas

Author:Achy Obejas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Special thanks to Gabor and Rex Wockner.

Man Oh Man

Man oh man, Ice is dead, as cold and white as shrimp. I’m telling you this because I want it to make sense, you know? I want you to understand that I knew nothing about it, other than that I was there, or rather, here, and that at one point I noticed the stuff that I thought was just beer on the floor was his blood, still gooey, still red in the middle and black around the edges of each puddle. I was sitting right in the big one, right in the one where he died, the one that killed him. It ruined my jacket, the one with all the zippers and patches. It’ll never come off, not really, not ever.

Man oh man, it’s tough to believe because just last night Ice was standing in the middle of my kitchen, flapping his arms around like a bird, talking about spring, talking about going to Florida or California or maybe New York City. He was saying we could have a kid, such a pretty kid, and smart, too, and wise, like us.

Ice, I said, man oh man, you’re crazy, and he laughed and laughed, and then I laughed, too. That’s all you can do sometimes, you know, laugh. And since we found out from the public health clinic, when we called up and got our little anonymous numbers checked, and the nurse on the phone wouldn’t tell either one us if we were positive or negative but wanted us to come in and be counseled—counseled, can you imagine that?—well, we just knew, and so we’d been laughing lately even more than usual.

We were still laughing when we got in his car and drove over here, where Luis had promised us some stuff. Luis owed it to us. We’d helped him last month, not just about dope but with a coat, ’cause it was still really cold then. It’s hard to get a coat for a guy Luis’s size. I don’t know where Ice got it—it fit perfect even though Luis is big and scaly like a dinosaur—and Ice kept teasing him that he’d had it tailor-made. Funny, huh?

You know, Ice was in a really good mood last night, like if he’d had anything, he would have definitely given it away by the end of the night. You know what I mean?

Well, we got here and Luis had the lights off and a bunch of candles lit. He introduced us to a girl named Daisy, whose face looked all punched in, not from fists or anything like that, but just as if she were born that way—punched in, squashed. Her hair was real long and fine and didn’t fit with the rest of her. I thought it might be a wig, except that there wasn’t much of it, and you could see the roots coming out of her scalp. Luis seemed proud of her one minute, then disgusted the next, like he just couldn’t make up his mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.