Nuyorican Obituary

I plopped on the floor and began watching a game show. I didn’t notice it right away, but there was something next to me. During a commercial, I turned and there was Barbie. She was curled next to me, quiet as a sleeping puppy and still. Like she wasn’t sick at all. She used to wake me up every morning by licking my face. She was better than an alarm clock.

As she lay here breathing slowly, I thought, maybe she’d gotten over whatever she’d been sick with. I was scared to move, not wanting her to move, not wanting her to go back to being a monster.

But after a while I had to get up to pee. And when I got back she had started again. Running back and forth, back and forth.

That night, Javier told my mother he didn’t like the dog running around like that, that he was going to put it in the bathroom for the night. I wen to sleep sad, worried about our poor dog stuck in the bathroom all night long, unable to run for whatever reason it was that made her run.

The next morning I was the first to wake up. I went to check the bathroom. There was no one, nothing there. My mother was in the kitchen, washing clothes.

“Where’s Barbie?”

“She die,” said Mami, without turning from the sink. “Poor thing.”

“Where is she?” I said.

Mami looked to the back window. On our back rooftop. I went closer to look. I could just see the outline of the body in the bag and the dark parts of her fur and the side of her face. Her teeth stuck out from her black lips. Her head was twisted almost all the way around.

“Why is her head that way?” I asked my mother.

“Javier say she probably going around and around and hit her head on the tub. That’s how she got her head that way.”

“Oh.”

“C’mon,” Mami said. “Eat some breakfast.”

A few months, Javier’s wife showed up from Puerto Rico and they got an apartment in Brownsville. My sister Evie asked for another dog and got another poodle mix. She named it Barbie.

I was alone in the bedroom playing with my action figures. I had an Aquaman doll whose head wouldn’t go back on because the rubber band inside his body had broken. The sun was bright in the room and I was hot and cranky and hungry. Javier came in and started yelling at me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told him to leave me alone.

“Que!!” he said. Then he undid his belt buckle, and it made a clinking metal sound.

That’s is when I said he should do a four-letter word to himself.

The belt was out. He got me once across the back before I was gone. I was small and slippery. I knew this could had been an advantage from all the fights I had with my brother. I got past Javier, through the short hallway between the bedroom and living room, and ran into the bathroom before Javier could get to me.

It was a tiny bathroom, with the claw-foot tub, a toilet with the tank above, and no sink. On the door was a little latch that went into a little ring. But, it only had a knob on the inside. On the outside there was only a hole. I held onto that knob and pulled it to me with all my strength.

Javier banged on the door and it shook. There was a glass front set in the door. It had been painted over a hundred times and you couldn’t see through it. Part of me was worried he would smash through it, but he wouldn’t do that, I told myself. Would he?

“Abres la puerta,” he said.

“No, fuck off!”

“Abres la puerta.”

“Fuck off!”

My brother and sister had been in the living room when I ran past. I knew they were watching. I also knew my mother was in the kitchen.

“Abres la puerta!”

“It’s ‘Open the door,’ you moron, this is America. You moron.”

I heard Martin and Evelyn start giggling. I think I heard Martin say, “Oh shit.”

“Abres la puerta!” I said, in a thick Puerto Rican accent, stretching out the syllables.

A hamper sat catty-cornered on the edge of the tub. Above it was a square tunnel that went up into darkness. When I asked my mother how could Santa Claus visit us since we didn’t have a fireplace, she said he came down that tunnel.

Then I started imitating Javier. “Me fwee para Chay Stadium. It was a berry goot game, a berry goot game.”

I heard my mother out there. From the way she laughed, I could tell she had a cigarette in her mouth.

Javier banged the door again, but with less force.

“Malcriado,” he said, and I heard him walking away. “I’m gonna get you.”

I stayed in there for another hour, doing impressions of Javier and Jerry Lewis and Abbott and Costello. When I came out, Fever and Evie looked sleepy, tired from laughing. Mami asked me if I wanted something to eat. Javier was not around.

My father called an open window a “Puerto Rican air conditioner.” Summer nights in Brooklyn were hot, and we kept all the windows of the apartment open. On most windows we had screens, but not on all of them. So then the mosquitoes would attack. After a while you could try to get used to them, to show them that you were stronger and they were just little bugs that were like vampires and needed your blood to live. But it was impossible to get used to them, and somehow, even if you hid your entire body under the covers, even though it was so hot, hot like a radiator, they found a way in, they found a way to get to you and bite you and feed off your blood. They would get your face and neck and ankles and fingers and mouth and thank god you kept your tight whities on or they would get you there, too. Maybe they kept at you till you were empty of blood, useless to them, or maybe they finally got so full they didn’t need you anymore. Because after a while, after most of the night was through, it seemed, they would stop, and you could finally fall into a deep sleep. If you could just stop scratching yourself.

Those nights, though, there was something else in the apartment. We all knew it was there. We could hear it moving slowly, never stopping, walking back and forth from one room to the other, its long nail making scratching noises on the linoleum.

Our dog, Barbie. She has once been a white snowball of a dog, a living toy. But she had become gray and nasty. We were too scared to pick her up, and she didn’t come anymore when you called her. She’d even stopped eating her food. It was like something had mutated her, had turned from Jekyll into Hyde, from Barbie into Hyde. My father said it wasn’t rabies. “It’s not rabies,” he said. “But it’s something.”

None of us knew what to do. My sister, whose dog it was supposed to be, would ask my father to take Barbie to the doctor but he said it cost too much. Our mother said the same thing. No one told us what was going to happen.

So we tried to ignore her during the day, waiting for the mystery to play itself out, and at night we lay in our beds, listening to the sound of our mutated poodle haunting the floors, like a monster invisible in the darkness.

I was on the living room floor, drawing in my notebook. My father and my cousin Javier were the bar.

“In Puerto Rico, is hard to get good work,” said Javier. “In New York, is harder.”

“No, it’s not,” my father said. “Depends where you look.”

Then my father told Javier about all the jobs he had had since he came to New York: dishwasher, waiter, bartender, factory worker, carpenter, plumber, janitor, encyclopedia salesman, delivery man, garage mechanic, short order cook, electrician, gravedigger, house painter, numbers runner, roofer, construction worker, driver, and even a dentist—for himself, he said, pointing out the space in the side of his own mouth where he had extracted a tooth with pliers.

But Javier said that was my father, that no one would give him, Javier, a job.

After another beer, my father told Javier he could help him do a roof in Bushwick. Javier asked him what would he have to do. Pop said it was just a lot of lifting and walking.

The next day, Pop picked up Javier early in the morning. My sister and I were wide awake and excited to see our father at a different time a day. It was like a whole new father.

“Good morning, Popi,” my sister said.

“Go back to sleep,” my father said.

Javier came out of the bathroom, looking very sleepy.

“You ready?” my father said to him.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Javier.

After they left, my sister and I somehow ended up fighting. She gave me a charleyhorse, and I cried to Mami, who yelled at my sister. I went back to bed. In the afternoon, I was eating a sandwich when my father and Javier came back.

Right away Javier went to lie down on the couch, where he slept at nights.

In the kitchen, my father started getting his numbers papers together. My mother asked him how everything went.

“You can’t ask a lemon tree to give you oranges,” he said.

“Que paso?” she said.

“He lifted more beers than anything,” he said.

Who says a literary journal internationally ridiculed for the ridiculousness of its poetry cannot also be as well known for its equally ludicrous prose?

FIRST PRIZE “The Scourge of Unlawful Infants” by Stoney Emshwiller
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The other entries and runners up will be uploaded once a month for the next 10 months.

Listen to Episode 58: “Asinine Poetry and the Half-Drunk Prince.”

Me and my brother Fever and my sister Evie were in the bedroom my brother and I shared. We were on the floor, huddled around our models. Barbie, for once, was quiet and still on the lower bunk of our bunk beds.

Fever was saying that his favorite model was his Godzilla model because he put it together himself. “The hand keeps falling off, but I like it when spines in the back glow in the dark,” he said. But he felt bad that he lost the little piece that was supposed to be fire coming out of Godzilla’s mouth.

He pointed to the Wolfman model and said, “Who can tell me who this is?”

“Me,” I said. “The Wolfman’s real name is Larry Talbot and he became a werewolf because he was bitten by a werewolf and he can only be killed with a silver bullet and they shoot him in the end.”

“Very good,” said Fever. Then he pointed to the Mummy and said, “And this monster?”

“The Mummy,” Evie said, “is from Egypt. He comes back from the dead with these leaves. It drinks tea made from the leaves and then it comes alive. Then it goes out and likes to choke people until they die.”

Fever pointed to the Creature of the Black Lagoon and said, “What is the name of this creature?”

We laughed loud and hard. He called the Creature Creature! I fell back on the floor and that’s when I saw Javier turning away from the doorway. He must have been watching us. He probably thought we were crazy.

My father came around only in the afternoons. He would bring the Daily News, and sometimes he would bring groceries. Mostly he was there to use the phone. From 1 to 3 he was a numbers bookie. Calls would come in and he would write the three-digit numbers, combination or straight, and the bet amount in little neat columns. He would use carbon paper to make copies. My father’s hands always had little blue marks on them from the carbon paper.

He would be there when we got home from school every day and he would make us lunch. My mother was not there, because she had a full-time job during that time. By six o’clock, he would be gone.

My father never seemed to like my mother’s side of the family. I didn’t know why. Whenever they were around he would tell me to watch them. If one of my mom’s nieces or nephews or sisters were in the living room and I was in the kitchen with my father, he would silently point to his eye and nod his head in their direction.

My father and Javier would drink cold Rheingold or Schlitz at the bar in the living room where Popi and I used to make the monster models, and my father and Javier would talk and watch the Mets on TV. Barbie would go back and forth, from the kitchen to the living, her nails scratching on the floor, the whole time they stood there. They talked in Spanish a lot, and I could not understand what they were saying.

New poems on AsininePoetry.com for August.
“Bring Me a Coldie, Obama” by Richard Cairo
“Aqui in Heaven” by Raul Chuletas
“Tour de Farce” by Dana Esau Larsen
“Thank You for Your Gift to Mizzou” by Katharine Showalter
“Schtupping the Chupacabra” by Jessica L. Kleinman
“My Dog’s Getting Older” by Albert Van Hoogmoed
“beta carotene” by Stephen Kopel
“The Sea” by Christian Ward
“Has Anyone Seen My Meds?” by Ryan Quinn Flanagan
“Alarm Clock Melody” by Heather L. Green aka the Dark One