"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright."

I was watching TV, on the floor, in the dark. I didn’t notice right away, but there was something nearby, something next to me. I waited for a commercial, and then I turned — and there was Barbie. She was curled up behind me, still and quiet as a sleeping puppy, with a wet, wet nose. Like she was never sick at all.

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. I stayed still for a long, long time.

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, faster and faster. All through the night. I stayed under the covers.

The next day, my sister Evie tried to stop her by picking her up, to hold her to calm her down, but Barbie whimpered and wiggled until Evie couldn’t hold on anymore and had to put her back down. Then she ran off again, back and forth, never stopping. We were scared.

My sister Evie and me started crying. And crying. So we had a conference about what to do. We did not include Fever because he never liked the dog since it was a poodle and it was named Barbie after a doll.

“What are we going to do about Barbie?” I said, still crying.

“Papi should bring it to the doctor,” she said, sniffling and tearing.

“Yeah! He should bring it to the doctor,” I said, crying a little less.

So we went to Mami, and Evie said, “What are we going to do about Barbie?”

Mami was making breakfast for us at the stove, fried eggs and platanos and fried Spam, and smoking a cigarette. She said, “Ask your father.”

When Papi came by in the afternoon, he was drinking beer and listening to the Mets on the radio. Evie went and told him, “Papi. Can you bring Barbie to the doctor?”

Malo was there, and he and Papi started talking in Spanish. Finally, Papi said he would bring the dog to the doctor the next day, but that night Malo would put the dog in the bathroom so it wouldn’t scare us.

Evie and I were finally happy. Our dog was going to be okay!

"Perhaps you prefer a gentleman. One of those fine-mannered and honorable gentlemen. Those panting hypocrites who like your legs but talk about your garters."

Our dog Barbie used to wake me up every morning by attack me, licking my face all over. I would laugh then put Barbie in a headlock, and she would get me back by licking my ears till they were really, really wet, which made me laugh even more. And that’s how I would wake up each day.

Then she would jump off the bed with a little bark and run down the hall. She was a little dog with white, curly fur. Her nails clicked on the linoleum. I wouldn’t get out of my foldout bed right away. I liked to stay there and listen. To the garbage truck outside, my sister snoring in the next room. But especially from the kitchen. The sound of Mami’s slippers. Her filling the coffee percolator with water then moving it on to the stove. A spoon in her cup. Her cough.

And that summer there were voices. Mami’s. And my cousin’s. No matter how quiet everything else was, I couldn’t hear what they said. It was probably in Spanish anyway.

Things were changing now. Barbie didn’t wake me up anymore. She had been acting funny. She didn’t come when you called her. She didn’t eat her food. She had once been a white snowball of a dog, but now she had become gray and nasty looking. But that was probably because we never bathed her, like we were supposed to. Sometimes she would growl at me for no reason. It was like something had changed her into a wild animal instead of the sweet poodle she was supposed to be.

Papi said it wasn’t rabies. “It’s not rabies,” he said. “But it’s something.”

My sister, whose dog it was really supposed to be, asked Papi to take Barbie to the doctor. But he said it cost too much. Mami said the same thing. None of us knew what was going to happen.

Every night now Barbie spent the whole night running from room to room. I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her. Her long nails clicked on the floor as she went back and forth in the darkness, back and forth, back and forth, from the bedrooms to the kitchen.

Even though it was very warm that summer, I would put the blanket over my head so that in the morning the dog could not find my face and attack me.

Puerco sucio!

My best friend Adolph and I liked to draw. When it was art time in first grade, we would draw scenes of stick people running away from monsters being forced into mountain caves and crowding into each other so much that they fell into big lava pits where the devil was waiting. We would spend the whole time on our drawings and add more rocks and more fire and more stick people. Then we would show our drawings to each other, and I would see something in the other’s art we could add to our own, like the way Adolph drew dinosaur teeth, or way I did helicopters with a half-circle and a triangle.

Donna was in my first grade class, too, and when we walked home she said she didn’t like Adolph because he was disgusting.

“Disgusting?” I said, imagining she meant like Pig Pen, but Adolph never looked like that.

“Ugh,” she said, and I didn’t know what she meant.

One time Adolph showed me you could make a squiggle on your desk with your no. 2 pencil, and if you wet your thumb and rubbed it you could turn the squiggle in a big swirly smudge. He had a few on his desk already. So I went back to my desk and tried it. I looked over and saw he did some more. So I did some more. This was during SRA time and our teacher Miss Emswhiller was at her desk and we were supposed to be doing something else.

I knew I had to do better than Adolph, so I worked fast, squiggling and smudging, squiggling and smudging. Maria Virginia de la Cruz, who sat next to me, looked over and said, “What are you doing?”

I didn’t care. I was creating something. It didn’t even matter what Adolph was doing. I knew what I had to do. And within a little while I’d done it!

I had covered my entire desk in spit pencil smudge. The shiny wood was now all gray and black and swirly.

It was beautiful. But then I saw it was also really, really disgusting.

Maria Virginia de la Cruz raised her hand and told the teacher, and Miss Emswhiller came over and said, “Edgar! What?”

She made me get the Comet and a sponge from the bathroom and made me clean my desk. I put Comet all over and scrubbed and scrubbed. “Make that desk sparkly clean, mister,” the teacher said.

All the kids were watching me. I looked over at Adolph but he pretended like he never invented desk smudging art. Then the teacher told me to stay after school. That was the first day in my life I ever ever stayed after school.

At three o’clock, Adolph and everybody else left, leaving me all alone in the very quiet classroom with my head down on my sparkly clean desk.

GODZILLA!!!!!!

I met my first best friend Adolph in kindergarten at P.S. 84. He was playing all alone, hanging the hand puppets by the neck with the cords from the Venetian blinds. These were hand puppets of a mom and dad and children and a doctor and a mailman. I asked him how he got them to stay, and he showed me. You didn’t have to make a knot. If you twisted the cord around a couple of the times, the puppets would hang there.

Then the teacher told us to stop hanging the puppets by the neck.

Adolph always looked like he needed a bath. And he seemed to hate all the other kids in the class and the teacher, and I liked our teacher, Mrs. K. But he loved monsters like I did. We both said we would bring in models that we each made at home. So the next day I brought in a glow-in-the-dark model of Godzilla I made. Actually, my father did most of the work. And actually it was my brother’s model. But he never walked with me to school, so when I went I carried it very carefully because it was a beautiful thing and I did not want to break it and make my brother angry.

When I got there I put it on my desk. Right away, the teacher made me talk about it, which I hated. I didn’t want the other kids to know about my glow-in-the-dark Godzilla. It was mine. Who cared about them? I just brought it in to show to Adolph.

But then Adolph didn’t bring in anything! And he kept wanting to touch my glow-in-the-dark Godzilla, and so I let him play with him, but I was scared the whole time he would break it.

Later on when I got home I saw that Godzilla’s tongue was missing! My brother never noticed, or he never said anything. I vowed to never, never, never bring anything of mine to school again.

Anyway, Adolph became my best friend after that.

"Duérmete mi niño, duérmete ya . . . . Que viene el Cuco y te comerá!"

There was an old, old man who dressed in black who used to walk down our block to find children to eat. Inch by inch, step by step, slowly he walked. When he would see any kids he would growl at them and paw in the air like the Mummy or like Dracula. He never did this to me because he always walked on the other side of the street, and I wasn’t allowed to cross the street on my own yet, so I didn’t get to go way over there very often. But I saw him do it, I saw him claw in the air, and I saw some kids run, and I saw some of them yell at him to go away.

The other kids told me this was the Child Eater. If you were alone, and he walked slowly by, he would take you to his house and cook you and eat you. He had been doing it for years. They said that’s why there were missing kids.

The funny thing was he looked a little like Santa Claus, with his big white beard and white face. And he wore a black suit and black shoes and a black hat that was flat on the top and had a white flat brim. But he also wore white socks.

One night I had a dream that the Child Eater was in the apartment and he had eaten my brother and my sister and Mami and Papi, even though Papi didn’t live with us. And I was alone, and he was somewhere between me and the door and there was no way I could get out without him catching me and eating me. I ran to the window to get out by the fire escape, but I couldn’t open the window it was too heavy and the big metal piece inside there that Papi said he was gonna fix still didn’t work and I could feel the Child Eater behind me, he was right behind me, I didn’t want to turn around, he was gonna rip my ear off and eat it first.

And then I would wake up running, my legs moving fast in the sheets and getting tangled.

I didn’t go outside a lot but I stopped seeing the Child Eater in the street. Maybe the police got him. Maybe he died. Or maybe he moved away to another place, where they didn’t know him, where he could pick up children to eat and no one would know.

Arriba! Pa' bajo . . .

They told me the Devil killed my uncle Jesus. My older cousin Fátima told me, “The devil shot our father in the basement.”

My aunt Religiosa had seven daughters, Eunice, Fátima, Judith, Mary, Magdalena, Novena, Ruth, and Sarah, and they lived in a house on Cornelia Street in Bushwick. They were very poor, and every time they came over my father told us to watch them. They always came over like a swarm of mosquitoes moving like a hurricane like the Tasmanian Devil. When they were gone, our whole apartment was a mess and we had no pork chops, no Yoo-Hoos, no Ring Dings.

Anyway, my other cousin Novena, told me the whole story about her father.

One day their father, who she said was a very, very good man, was in the basement in their building. And he was there at night, just being a good man, a good father. And then behind him, out of the darkness, the Devil appeared. She said he had tiny black beard, a shiny bald head glistening, sharp horns, feet like a goat, and big, yellow teeth. The Devil likes basements, she said, because they are the the part of a house closest to Hell, which everyone knew was underground. The Devil probably popped up right out of the dirt floor or came out from that dark, dark spot behind the boiler, she said. There was probably a little door back there that went straight to Hell. That’s where the Devil came from and took out a gun and shot their father in the back.

Later, in the winter, the landlord made my brother Rafael and I go down to the basement, since Papi didn’t live there or else he would do it, to turn on the hot water. I stayed close to my brother, knowing that the Devil was hiding down there, waiting to jump out from the darkness, waiting to kill us.

One time it was very hot down there, and I wanted my brother to hurry. He was in a hurry, too. But he bumped into the lightbulb hanging from the low ceiling, and the light went out. We were it black black darkness. We ran for the wooden stairs. Just as I was going up, I looked down once more and saw two red eyes staring at me from the floor.

Love in the time of Converse

I remember Desiree was the first girl I ever loved, the first girl I ever wanted to marry.

I remember I was going to be 4 and she was 7.

I remember she lived next door to us at 123 South Second, and her mother’s name was Cookie and her brother was Rene, so they were Desiree and Rene.

I remember Desiree was a beautiful. She was the color of cafe con leche, but with maybe not so much milk. She had black hair and big brown eyes and even at 4 I knew I wanted to marry her.

I remember what I liked most about Desiree was that she let me sit on her lap when we played house. She would let me sit on her lap and kiss her soft, soft cheek.

I remember they moved away and we never saw them again.

I remember the girl who did move in there used to stomp on your feet if you got new sneakers, Converse or Pro Keds. If she found out you got new sneakers she would find you and stomp on your bright, clean new sneakers so that they didn’t look so new anymore and also so that your feet hurt the whole rest of the day.