The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop

Casualidades

CASUALIDADES [143] Casualidades CAROLYN ALESSIO On the street near the bus stop a group of teenaged boys stood in a circle, sharpening their rusted machetes. Berta pulled her market bag closer as she walked toward the bus. The ladrones, the thieves, weren’t likely to rob anyone until payday—two days off—but Berta moved with caution. Three rotting onions knocked together inside her bag, next to a vial of medicine. She always carried old onions with her medicine because the people in her village were nosey and if they tried to look into her bag they would smell the odor and stay away. This morning she had taken off work to go to the hospital on the hill for a checkup. She had not had a seizure for two weeks, but the medicine gave her gas, a constant rumbling that pained and embarrassed her. A week ago she had stopped taking the full dosage. The faded green bus started uphill, groaning and halting. Berta looked in vain for an empty seat. The bus driver shifted gears jerkily , and Berta nearly stumbled. As she reached for the bar above to steady herself, a woman in an embroidered smock pulled her basket of chicks onto her lap and gestured at the empty seat next to her. Berta smiled and sat down. At the sewing cooperative where she worked, none of the CAROLYN ALESSIO [144] women wanted to sit by Berta anymore. Her seizures had increased in the past year, and the women had begun to treat Berta like someone they thought the priest should exorcise. She took to working alone, hunched over in a dim corner of the cinderblock building, but even that didn’t work. Two weeks ago she had been cutting out striped jaspe fabric for a vest when the strange singing rose up inside her, the low song without words that always heralded her attacks . She tried to muffle the sounds, to quiet her trembling hands, but the rumbling notes escaped from her mouth and her fingers shook, releasing the scissors. They landed a foot away from her nearest coworker, Esperanza, but Esperanza screamed anyway. Later, when Berta opened her eyes, the women stood around her in a circle and the gringo boss told her that she needed medical attention. A man sitting near the front of the bus stood up, pulled out a package of colored pencils, and began to call out their virtues. Berta shifted in her seat near the back, next to the woman with the basket of squirming, squeaking chicks. She wondered if they could smell her onions. The vendor walked down the aisle. In a clear plastic case he held a rainbow spread of pencils: red, light blue, green, yellow, and an orange that nearly matched the pair of vinyl shoes Berta wore, a purchase that had cost her nearly a month’s wages. “Good prices, a bargain,” the vendor said, strolling up and down the aisle. Neither Berta nor the woman next to her looked as he passed, but inside Berta’s head she had begun to draw, starting with a red pencil for the clay along the road, then moving upward, shading in the sky as it looked at daybreak, a blue-gray haze that covered the mountains and the inactive volcanoes. This was her view from the roof of her mother’s house as Berta fed the chickens and roosters in the early morning. The bus lurched and Berta felt a nip from a chick at her elbow. The seizures always began with singing, a low thrumming that started below her breastbone and traveled upward, swirling in gritty CASUALIDADES [145] circles around her throat and emerging from Berta’s mouth in syllables that many villagers thought were too low for a woman. Sometimes they started at work, but mostly the attacks happened at home, the strange song catching her as she leaned over the pila to wash a glass sticky with rice drink, or tend the fire for tortillas that her mother had started but forgotten to watch. Berta’s house was made of cinderblock and sheets of thin wood that darkened in the rain and shuddered during the windy season. She was twenty-nine and lived with her mother. Every other woman of her age in the village had a man and children; some even had grandchildren. Berta babysat for her sisters’ and neighbors’ children , not...