Stumblefiction & photography

WH

AT IS

TH

IS?

04

about

Stumble is an independent art and literary magazine devoted entirely to short

fiction and photography. There’s no particular reason, other than we just love

good stories and photography. We publish four times a year (quarterly-ish), and

accept submissions year-round. Please see our website for complete submission

guidelines: www.stumblemag.com. Can’t find Stumble in your favorite

bookstore? You can always find us at magcloud.com.

Issue Number 3, January 2010. Copyright © - Stumble Magazine

No portion of Stumble may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without written permission. Individual copyright of the creative work

within belongs to each author/photographer upon publication.

All questions/comments may be directed to info@stumblemag.com

STAFF

Editor & Publisher Nancy Smith

Photography EditorAndrew Monko

Fiction EditorAnthony Russo DesignersSachiko KuwabataNancy Smith

Copy EditorsAndrea Gough Katie Kinney

WH

AT P

AG

E?

06

The Pollution Machine By Jason Jordan

page14

contents

Contributors A little bit about the people who made this

page11

Letter from the Editor Welcometo the issue

page09

throughoutPhotography By Sarah Small

Coffee By René Solivan

page26

HE

LLO

08

Hello.

Welcome to our winter issue.

Here you’ll find an eclectic mix of things. We’ve collected two stories that

live on completely different ends of the literary spectrum, both remarkably

smart and touching, and placed them amidst a handful of beautifully unusual

photographs. The idea of mixing elements that don’t quite fit together seems

to be part of the ever-evolving purpose of this magazine. Sometimes we end

up with a selection of creative work that all seems to flow together, almost

thematic in its cohesion. Sometimes we don’t. In this case, I think it’s the

latter, and we’ve ended up with an especially charming issue. I look forward to

collecting more disparate pieces and giving them a home in these pages. In

the meantime, I hope this issue inspires your curiosity.

Enjoy.

Nancy Smith

Editor & Publisher

welcome

WH

O A

RE

WE

?

10

Jason Jordan holds an MFA from Chatham University. His

forthcoming books are Cloud and Other Stories (Six Gallery Press, 2010)

and Powering the Devil’s Circus: Redux (Six Gallery Press, 2010). His

prose has appeared online and in print in over forty literary magazines,

including Hobart, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, Night Train, PANK, Pear

Noir!, and Storyglossia. Additionally, he’s Editor-in-Chief of decomP,

accessible at www.decompmagazine.com. You can visit him at his blog at

poweringthedevilscircus.blogspot.com.

René Solivan’s writing has won the 2009 Northridge Review Fiction

Award, the MetLife National Playwriting Award, and an LTI Mark Taper

Forum Writing Commission. Recent short stories have appeared or are

forthcoming in River Poets Journal, Mosaic, and Northridge Review. In

2008 René received his B.A. in English (Cum Laude) with a focus in creative

writing from CSUN. He has lived in New York, Arizona, California and

recently moved to Nevada where he lives with his partner of 19 years. In

between writing René devotes huge amounts of time trying to decide if he

should buy a dog or just a picture of a dog.

Sarah Small graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.

Now Brooklyn-based, Sarah has turned her childhood hobby of photography

into her life’s passion. Interaction fascinates her, specifically between people,

but also humans and animals. Her varied subjects—from infants to the aged,

from taxidermy to live animals—inhabit surreal scenarios often in absurd

association with one another. Sarah also sings and writes music for Black Sea

Hotel, her Bulgarian a cappella quartet. Since 1997, she has taken a diaristic

Polaroid of herself every day. She plans to pursue this project for life.

contributors

The Pollution Machine

By Jason Jordan

The Pollution Machine must run at all times and I’m the one who runs it.

I’m the one who runs it because I have four arms.

The machine is an internal combustion engine on a waist-

high platform. A tube connects to the exhaust pipe so the pollution

runs up the tube, through the ceiling, and into the air. There are

lots of other people and machines in this warehouse, but I’m the

one most qualified to run The Pollution Machine, except for Lefty,

the only other person on Earth with four arms. He takes over for me

when my twelve-hour shifts end. He prefers his left hands. I prefer

my rights.

While I’m running the machine, one arm constantly feeds it

gasoline. One arm oils it. One arm fixes any problems that arise. And

one arm takes care of my bodily functions and needs. This system

is in place to prevent me from having to leave my station for the

J. JOR

DA

N

15

TH

E P

OLL

UT

ION

MA

CH

INE

16

duration of my shift, which is twelve hours per day, seven days per

week. I live in this warehouse and I’m not permitted to leave.

According to my supervisor, if The Pollution Machine stops,

we will be punished by being killed. On my first day, many years ago,

I asked my supervisor why we had to run the machine.

Population control, he said.

I do not understand, I said.

If the air is polluted, people won’t live as long. There are too

many people on this planet. We’re running out of water, food, and

land. We’ve been ordered to spread pollution in the poorest cities,

in secret. Be glad you live in here and breathe good clean air.

My mother, who I love very much, considered having two of my arms

amputated when I was a newborn. She told me I looked perfectly

normal otherwise. When I was a child yet old enough to fully

understand my condition—that other people had two arms and I had

four—my mother took me to visit a doctor so he could explain it.

You have evolved faster than the rest of us, he told me. We

were in his office. There were stacks of paper on his desk, as well as

a computer and some framed pictures. I couldn’t see the pictures

because they were facing away from me. He took a slab of white

cardboard off his desk and turned it around. It was a drawing of the

evolutionary chart, illustrating the steps it took for man to evolve

from the apes. He continued, I’ve seen your kind before Christopher.

Not your kind exactly but people who have extraordinary abilities the

rest of us don’t. Do you know where Honduras is?

17

No, I said.

It’s far away from here. It’s another country. There I met a

boy who could regulate his body temperature. Do you know what

regulate means?

It means he could make it go up or down, I said. My four

hands were folded in my lap.

That’s right. Very good. No one else in the world can do that.

I told my supervisor: Don’t let anyone touch me because I don’t like

to be touched.

This was when I began running The Pollution Machine. We

were up in the part of the warehouse that overlooks the whole place.

It has a lot of windows and it’s much quieter in there than down on

the floor.

My supervisor picked up the intercom mic and said, This man

is not to be touched. If you touch him you will be shot on site.

Everyone looked up at us.

Thank you, I told him. I stretched out my hand—my top right

one—and shook his right hand. He had glasses, a paunch, and male

pattern baldness, but I liked him anyway.

Do you know where India is, Christopher? the doctor asked. He was

leaning back in his chair, still behind his desk.

No, I said.

It’s another country too, he said, in Asia. There’s a boy—a

teenager—who can run faster than any human alive today.

J. JOR

DA

N

18

Is he as fast as a cheetah? I asked. I was curious, but naturally

uneducated about such matters.

Not quite. A cheetah can run up to seventy-five miles per

hour, while this boy can only run up to thirty-five miles per hour. The

fastest humans can reach near thirty miles per hour, so he’s certainly

advanced. We may be a long way from reaching the speed of the

cheetah, but we’re getting there.

Where’s there?

Why, the next stage of evolution. It’s an exciting time,

Christopher.

The other workers have started throwing things at me—pebbles,

coins, small things the cameras can’t detect. This distracts me from

running The Pollution Machine, but at least they aren’t touching me.

Touching reminds me of the doctor, the experiments, the needles,

the pain.

Under the glass enclosure in the warehouse is a banner that

says, DO NOT UTILIZE TWO PEOPLE WHEN ONE WILL SUFFICE.

The banner is referring to me. There will be consequences for the

warehouse workers if I’m injured and forced to hand over my job to

two people.

I do not want to run The Pollution Machine any longer. I have

decided that I will cut off one of my hands when I’m supposed to be

sleeping. I have not decided which hand I will cut off, but I know I

will not miss it.

TH

E P

OLL

UT

ION

MA

CH

INE

19

Can I go now? I asked the doctor.

Sure Christopher, he said. I don’t mean to keep you. We’ll be

running more tests in the coming weeks, so be sure you listen to your

mother. You can go to her now.

Thank you, I said and walked out his door. I walked down the

hallway and back into the waiting room where I hugged my mother

with all my arms and said, I don’t want these anymore.

J. JOR

DA

N

CoffeeBy René Solivan

27

R. S

OLIVA

N

When the sunlight arrived on the island it moved through their

house like ghosts, flooding her mother’s tidy rooms with warm light.

And in that moment the coquíes would stop singing and their house

would come back to life aided by the smell of coffee that rose from

the fields behind their house. Every morning, Lourdes and her family

would sit at the breakfast table and she’d wish she wasn’t eleven but

old enough to drink coffee, this coffee, Puerto Rico’s finest. She and

her sister had tasted it once from a half-filled cup their father had left

behind one morning. They never forgot the taste or how alive and

alert they felt afterwards.

On a windowsill she caught a glimpse of a grey lizard lounging

in the shade, and then vanish so quickly that she wondered if it was even

there. Lourdes ate her breakfast, studying the morning light, the way it

softened the lines around her father’s eyes, the way it lengthened her

28

CO

FFE

E

mother’s shadow as she fussed over her family. The girl loved living on

a coffee plantation, loved helping her father pick beans and the way her

fingers smelled like coffee afterwards. And when her friends came over she

would drag them through the coffee fields and tell them everything she

knew like how the best way to plant the coffee, ensuring the best bean with

the best flavor, was to put seven seeds in a hole at the beginning of the

rainy season—and not a moment sooner—or the beans would not change

colors when roasted, her father would say, and they must change colors so

they can be labeled: light, medium, dark and very dark.

Years later, Lourdes thought of her father’s words as she sat

across from Javier in their modest home in the Riverdale section of the

Bronx. She was staring into her coffee, examining the color, claiming, to

herself, that it was dark, no very dark. Yes, Papi would call this very dark.

They were sitting in the dining room and, like every morning, she sipped

her coffee and wondered how she ended up marrying a Puerto Rican

who didn’t drink coffee.

“How’s your tea?” Lourdes asked without the least bit of interest.

“The movie’s at noon,” Javier said, his head peeking up from

the top of The New York Times. “I’ll meet you in front of the Film Forum

at eleven forty-five. The tea’s fine.”

“I’m meeting Mercedes at three.”

He assured her that she’d be out in time to meet her sister.

Lourdes held her nose over her cup, inhaled then asked, “What movie?”

“Love Story,” he said, setting the paper down on the table.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“Love Story. Ryan O’Neal, Ali MacGraw.”

Lourdes poured herself another cup of coffee and considered

suggesting another movie, a current movie, anything made in this

29

decade. Javier was a retired history professor who was trapped in the

past, willingly. Current topics didn’t interest him; current films interested

him even less. She opened her mouth, paused, then closed it, regretting

having told him years ago that she hadn’t seen the film, this Love Story.

She had heard it was a sad film, a tearjerker and how she despised that

word; the whole idea of having her tears jerked out of her really pissed

her off and Javier knew this, knew how she avoided these films but he

was determined to see one with her anyhow. After twenty-nine years of

marriage, Javier had never seen Lourdes cry. This bothered him.

And Lourdes cried often but she always made sure to secure an

isolated place, a closet, a pantry, an empty subway car, or her favorite, a

running shower. Only once, when they were first married, did he walk in

on her. She was standing in the shower crying silently when Javier joined

her, aroused. He made love to her and she cried the whole time, hiding

her tears under the spray of warm water. He never noticed.

When Lourdes was twelve her father died of a heart attack in

bed, not his bed, a neighbor’s. A very pretty one. Her mother refused to

cry for her unfaithful husband, demanding the same from her daughters,

their tears met with lashings that lasted into the night. By the time they

sat at their father’s funeral surrounded by teary relatives, Lourdes and

her sister Mercedes remained like their mother: stoic, dry-eyed and

bored as if they were waiting for a bus.

Lourdes reached for a wool scarf, this long ivory thing, its edges

adorned with coffee stains that always reminded her to wash the damn

thing though she never did. Her eyes slid from the movie ad to Javier’s

head, to his bald spot guarded by strands of curly grey hair. Hair she

had come to accept. She missed when it was dark and thick, she often

told him. It was the first thing she noticed, his hair, when she saw him

R. S

OLIVA

N

30

in the main library of Columbia University. She was an undergraduate

student (a senior), he was a professor specializing in Latin History.

And though she’d had crushes on professors in the past this one was

different, he was different. He wasn’t a Smith or a Stein or a Brown,

no, he was a Velez and he was dark and exotic like her. She enrolled in

one of his classes simply to be near him, this man eighteen years her

senior. His Latin History class bored her, but he did not. There was an

intoxicating bravado to his teaching style that she admired, one she

would try to imitate years later in her own classes with little success. She

flirted with him all semester but it wasn’t until she graduated that he

agreed to meet at Mirth, her favorite coffee shop, a hole in the wall on

106th and Broadway filled with creative types smoking, not on a patio

but inside when one could still smoke inside.

“What are you doing this morning?” Lourdes asked.

“Stuff,” he said, finishing his toast.

“Stuff?”

“Yes…stuff.”

From the start, their conversations fell into two categories:

painfully strained or exhilaratingly combative. She couldn’t wait for

him to pick her up for their dates; by the end of each night she wanted

nothing to do with him. She learned to embrace these extremes once

they slept together. She was not surprised that he turned out to be a

passionate lover. After all he was Puerto Rican, it was expected. There

was a rampant, animalistic ferocity in their lovemaking that she had

never experienced. And unlike her younger lovers, students mostly, Dr.

Javier Velez was not into talking after sex or showing affection. He didn’t

even like to cuddle. She liked that.

Javier reached for his pill case and studied the letters:

S M T W T F S.

CO

FFE

E

31

“It’s Thursday,” Lourdes said. When Javier reached for the

wrong compartment, she offered, “The second T.”

Lourdes repeated herself, twice more, until Javier took his pills.

She looked out the window, adjusting her scarf. The wind was blowing

hard keeping yesterday’s snow in motion. Smoke rose from their

neighbor’s chimney, bled into the sky then mocked a cluster of clouds.

Lourdes took a final sip of coffee and looked at Javier who was staring

at the newspaper, intensely, his lips moving, his face contorted as if

preparing for a sneeze that never came. She knew there was no point in

disturbing him now with trivial things like how his newspaper was upside

down. What would be the point? She kissed him goodbye and—for a

brief moment—was annoyed that he never noticed.

At fifty-two she still carried her trim frame with the ease and

quickness of a much younger woman. She moved through Central Park

cautiously, avoiding the small mounds of snow that stood in her path.

She loved this walk. It relieved the tension that was buried in her bones.

Lourdes found her favorite bench and sat down. The snow had claimed

everything. A horse and carriage went by carrying a young man and

woman bundled up in bright colors, tourists no doubt. A bird, a little

fluffy brown thing, landed on the bench and perused her.

“I have nothing for you,” she said.

And as if understanding her, the bird skipped to the edge of

the bench and took off. Her eyes followed its path until the sun blinded

her. Lourdes moved her scarf up over her nose and inhaled, suddenly

comforted by the smell of coffee buried in the stains. Then she studied

the sunlight, the way it drew colors out of everything it touched, the

R. S

OLIVA

N

32

same way she studied it as a girl when she lived on the island. She

liked when the light was sharp, brilliant, falling like stardust on the

heads of children climbing mango trees. Sometimes the light was dull

and indifferent, rude even, forcing her to run and hide from it. On rare

occasions the light seemed to be in the most glorious mood, making

everyone it touched look beautiful; love traveled in this light, Lourdes

believed. It lived, slept and wept there. Then by nightfall, she would

forget about the light and become intrigued by the dark that assembled

in the stones and the cracks. This is when she would paint, casting her

memories in watercolors. That was all she ever did as a girl, paint. When

she was ten Lourdes painted a group of children in fanciful colors. It

was her greatest creation, she believed. She gave it to her father as a

birthday gift who promptly hung it over his favorite chair. That night she

passed by her parents’ bedroom. Her father was in bed, reading. Her

mother was standing in front of Lourdes’ painting, brushing her hair.

“I love my Lourdes,” her mother said in Spanish. “But it looks

like she paints with her eyes closed.”

Lourdes never painted again.

“Dr. Lourdes Velez is the best art history professor I’ve ever

had.” Though she had never heard anyone say this, Lourdes convinced

herself that they sat around, her students, and said such things, in

cafeterias or bookstores, skimming through art books, sipping coffee.

This thought tumbled through her head as she drifted through the

halls of the art building at Hunter College, doing her best not to make

eye contact with the students. What made her a successful professor,

she believed, was her unwavering aloofness, a trait she made sure was

CO

FFE

E

33

always on display. Lourdes knew her students feared her, many even

hated her, she was sure of that. She watched them now, these young

men and women passing her by in the hall, some with pierced ears,

others with eccentric looks, their locks dipped in colors lifted out of

crayon boxes, the odd colors, the ones that even she, as a child, didn’t

know what to do with. While some of her colleagues met with students

after classes, at bars and coffee houses to engage in trivial arguments

about Impressionism or their favorite Monet painting, Lourdes avoided

participating in such inappropriate behavior.

“You should make an effort,” Javier said to her once, “to

connect with them.”

“I have office hours,” Lourdes said. “Students can come by

every Tuesday between two and three and discuss whatever they want.”

“Do they?”

“Some do,” she lied.

A colleague passed Lourdes in the hall. They exchanged nods

and she continued drifting, examining, making sense of these young

people rushing by in peculiar clothing that said, Look at me, I’m special.

She understood them. She too, at their age, made herself up as she

went along, out of regrets and resentments and whatever the latest

fashion was. In her senior year, after one more vicious exchange with her

mother, Lourdes decided to rid herself of anything that reminded her

of the old widow. Lourdes took her hair—that was as long and black as

her mother’s—chopped it off and dyed it the color of chicken fat. Her

spiky do looked like the top of a yellow cactus. When her mother saw

her at a family gathering, the small woman sipped her coffee and said,

in broken English, “Now your outside matches the inside.” And even

though Lourdes was not sure what that meant, she despised the tone

R. S

OLIVA

N

34

in the woman’s voice. She didn’t call her mother for months. This

went on for years. Mother and daughter rarely exchanged words and

when they did, the words were polite and brief, always brief. She

took days, sometimes weeks, to return messages from her mother.

Lourdes wanted nothing to do with her. She had never forgiven the

old widow for selling the coffee plantation and moving her and her

sister (still in their teens) to Brooklyn. Her mother purchased a brick

house with the smallest yard in the world. When Lourdes saw this

yard for the first time she said nothing. She went to her room, sat in a

closet and cried for a year.

Ten minutes before she was due in class Lourdes stepped into

her tiny office. She went through her mail then tossed it in the trash.

She checked her voicemail but there were no messages, there haven’t

been any in years and she wondered why she even bothered checking

anymore. Everything was done via email now and this distressed her,

never hearing a voice on a message, even a short one like Call me, we

need to talk. But no one needed to talk anymore and this made her

sad now; she tried to push the feeling away but it kept jabbing at her

from all sides. Finally, she surrendered. Lourdes closed her office door

and sat there, crying, scanning her emails, writing the same response

to each one: Call me.

Lourdes wiped her eyes and opened her office door. She began

to color her cheeks with peach blush, lots of it. It was the only color

able to offset the cruel green tones cast by the fluorescent lights that

followed her around all day. Her colleagues were walking by her door,

paired off in twos and threes discussing evening plans. Lourdes was

CO

FFE

E

35

never included. When she was asked once at a department gathering

what her biggest regret was, she lied and said, “Not having children.”

It seemed like the best answer to give, the one she felt would gain

her the most sympathy. Her biggest regret, however, was her inability

to make friends, to show interest in others, to carry a conversation,

things that contributed to her realization that she had not been able

to avoid becoming her mother, a woman who often spent her time

in a dark house, alone, while her daughters sat outside watching the

neighborhood women carrying on, smoking, laughing, often dancing

with each other in their summer dresses.

“Don’t you have a class now?” a female colleague asked, her

head suspended in the doorway.

Lourdes nodded, pleased that someone had actually spoken

to her. She opened her mouth to engage the woman but she had

already vanished.

She kept her pacing to a minimum during her lecture, making

sure she never wandered too far from the podium. Her notes—on blue

index cards—were stacked neatly in front of her. Though Lourdes had

not read from an index card or even glanced at one in over ten years

she felt comforted that they were there, these cards, convinced she’d be

lost without them.

“Charles Baudelaire, a French art critic, once wrote,” Lourdes

said from the podium, “‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in

choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling…’”

Her monotone voice continued and she heard it but didn’t

recognize it, feeling as if it were coming from a less interesting professor

R. S

OLIVA

N

36

standing behind her. Her eyes wandered the room making sure never

to rest too long on any particular student, especially the ones hiding

behind laptops. Lately, it was a challenge for Lourdes to ignore the

persistent sound of fingers slamming against keypads. But it wasn’t

the tapping that distracted her but the idea that her students were

not taking notes but updating their Facebook page or searching

Craigslist for a free futon or typing over and over I’m so fucking bored!

Who could blame them, she thought. Even she was bored with her

own lecture, with the whole idea of Romanticism, a movement that

emphasized in its time—for the first time—strong emotions as part

of the aesthetic experience and what a ridiculous idea that was, she

had written, years ago, on one of her index cards. Suddenly, Lourdes

began to rush through her lecture, anxious for it to end. Her slide show

of art from the Romantic period—Fuseli and Delacroix mostly—was

now at the mercy of her twitching finger, flashing rapidly on the screen,

making her feel as if she were on drugs, as if she were drowning in the

very artwork she was talking about.

Lourdes ended the slide show abruptly and turned on the

lights. There was a silence in the classroom as everyone waited for

their eyes to adjust to the light. The students studied Lourdes and she

knew they were trying to determine if her lecture was indeed over.

They were waiting for her usual cue and, after a few seconds, she gave

it to them. Lourdes raised her left eyebrow, a gesture that affected

the room like a magic wand, prompting her students to come back

to life with a feistiness that only surfaced during the Q&A portion of

the class. They were disputing her lecture now with questions that

challenged her claims about Romanticism. Dr. Lourdes Velez defended

herself with arguments she had memorized in grad school, quoting

CO

FFE

E

37

facts and figures, citing sources, her voice soft and toneless as if she

were reading a camera manual. At the end of the class there was

still no consensus in the room but Lourdes did not care. She left the

classroom with a small smile hidden under her scarf, content that

her students had done exactly what she had wanted, engaged in the

obliteration of Romanticism.

Lourdes arrived at the Film Forum with her mind drained,

her body exhausted, ready more for a nap than a movie. She found

someone there that resembled Javier, a younger Javier, staring at a

movie poster, rocking back and forth like a child waiting for his mother.

He looked almost like he did when she first met him, his hair dark

without a trace of gray, still messy but in a cool way. His black coat was

open, revealing a cranberry sweater she had never seen; it hung loosely

disguising his large belly.

“You like?” Javier said.

“What did you do?” Lourdes said, kissing him.

“I got here early and was walking by this hair place on Waverly

and thought, ‘Why not? It’ll kill some time.’ Then I went shopping. Is this

color too much?”

Lourdes smiled and shook her head. Javier took her hand and

she didn’t feel like she had in the last few years, like she was out with an

uncle she was fond of. She didn’t pretend to cough in order to pull her

hand away from his grip either. When Lourdes is asked, years later, if she

was surprised that Javier had taken his own life, she will say yes, yes she

was surprised and then she will talk about this moment and his hair and

the cranberry sweater. She will remember the rest of their date going

R. S

OLIVA

N

38

by quickly, each moment overlapping with the next one, flashing by like

the movie trailers that played that night. Some details will be vague for

Lourdes, others will be very clear like the moment when the Love Story

theme filled the theatre and the audience broke into applause. Or how

the air smelled like butter and nachos.

Lourdes stared at Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal rolling around

in bed. She wondered when was the last time she and Javier had made

love. Five years, six, probably longer but it wasn’t her fault.

“It’s the pills,” she had told Mercedes once. “The ones that

lower his blood pressure, that keep his anxiety in check, that help his

liver function. They’re to blame, not me, it’s them that make it difficult

for him to stay excited and alert and…you know, I used to try everything

to keep him aroused. Then I tried nothing.”

Ali MacGraw was dying on screen. From a hospital bed she

asked Ryan O’Neal to hold her. He climbed onto her, fully clothed, and

held her. Javier wiped his eyes and grabbed Lourdes’ hand in the dark.

As soon as she felt the tears on his fingers, warm and wet, Lourdes

pretended to cough and pulled her hand away.

The cab stopped in front of the Whitney Museum and Lourdes

saw Mercedes on the corner with her hands all over the place, her

mouth moving rapidly looking as if she were talking to herself instead

of the Bluetooth device in her ear. Then Javier said something about a

grocery store, how he was going to stop at one and pick up a few things

and did she need anything.

“Coffee,” she said, unlocking the cab door.

Javier began to mumble, quietly at first, making no sense

CO

FFE

E

39

R. S

OLIVA

N

as if his sentences had shattered in his head, like glass, and then

reassembled themselves in random order. The cab driver’s eyes met

hers in the rearview mirror. Lourdes looked away. Javier’s mumbling

grew louder. She pulled him close and kissed him on the lips, hard, the

way she used to kiss him a million years ago after he had been away,

for days, on a conference or something. It lasted some time, this kiss,

and when it was over Lourdes looked at Javier. “And maybe if I had

known,” Lourdes will say tomorrow to Mercedes, “that I wasn’t going

to see him again, I would’ve said something important, you know, like

how I still loved him.”

Instead, Lourdes picked up her bag and stepped out of the cab,

never looking back.

It was after eleven when she arrived home wet and exhausted

and wishing she had gone home with Mercedes. Like every night Javier

had left all the lights on in the house; it helped him fall asleep, it made

him feel like there were people in all the rooms. Lourdes turned up

the heat then began her nightly ritual, drifting from room to room,

turning lights off. She reached their office and paused. The room had

been transformed into a classroom. The blackboard that had sat in

the basement for years was now attached to a wall with large nails that

further splintered the old wood frame. There was a message on the

board written in blue chalk with flawless penmanship: The Napoleonic

Rule of Spain and Its Consequences. In the middle of the room sat three

school desks. She moved by them slowly, noticing the same worn book

resting on every desktop, each one opened to the same page, one

dominated by Francisco de Goya’s painting, The Second of May 1808.

She remembered the painting, seeing it for the first time in Dr. Javier

Velez’s history class.

Lourdes turned off the light and went to their bedroom.

She was explaining to the police now that she had been out

with her sister all afternoon then they went to see a play and she

couldn’t remember the name of it but the program was in her purse.

Lourdes began to feel herself becoming annoyed at these strangers in

blue moving about her bedroom, questioning, inspecting, searching

for god knows what while Javier’s body hovered over a mountain

of coffee beans. His body hung there like a giant marionette some

puppeteer had tossed aside. Lourdes looked at her Javier, at his body

swaying, shaking her head, casually, as if he were trying on a shirt

she did not approve of. Cut him down already, she kept thinking, her

impatience growing the way it did when she waited too long at the

bank to make a deposit.

Later, when the police and ambulance had driven away taking

Javier with them, Lourdes sat in their bedroom, alone, wishing a

neighbor, any neighbor, had come over and kept her company. Instead,

she was consoled by a mountain of coffee beans. She opened her cell

and called her sister, then her mother. She sat on the bed, listening to

the raindrops tapping on the windows as if they were begging to be let

in. She looked at Javier’s rope curled up in a corner. It reminded her of

an old mop head like the kind her mother used to use. Lourdes moved

and knelt in front of the coffee beans. Her hand reached into the pile

and grabbed a few beans and she shook them in her hand like dice.

Lourdes dragged the old school desks and blackboard onto

40

CO

FFE

E

the sidewalk. She stood in the slush, allowing the rain to drench her.

She wondered if Javier could see her now, see her face and tell the

difference between the raindrops and her tears. Then she went inside

and stood in the bedroom, lost, as if she was in someone else’s house.

The candle she had lit earlier in their bedroom was still burning. She

moved the Windsor chair to the window, sat down and waited for her

mother and sister to arrive. She looked at the coffee beans shimmering

in the candlelight, their shadows shifting with the flame as if they were

breathing. Lourdes closed her eyes and inhaled until she could see it

all, clearly, her room as a little girl, the coffee field behind their house,

her father walking through it in the moonlight, the glow of his burning

cigarette following him like a firefly. Then she felt comforted when she

heard them, in the distance, the songs of the coquíes, echoing through

her mother’s tidy rooms. 41

R. S

OLIVA

N

www.stumblemag.com