Fri 21 Aug 2009
South 2nd St.: Monsters, Part 9
Posted by RNz under South 2nd Street
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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.
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.
I was on the living room floor, drawing in my notebook. My father and my cousin Javier were the bar.
