The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry

Old Women

Little packages, ohyes, all old women make little packages and stow them under their beds. —Jose Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night Evidence of a woman's hard life on faces lined with meaning like the Rosetta Stone; a litany of ailments, marks of fear, nights of pain, knowledge of solitude, of shameful family secrets, and the occasional ecstasy they dare you to decipher. Stored under groaning mattresses are the remnants of their lives wrapped in little packages, taped or tied with string: wedding photos jaundiced with age and humidity, of couples standing stiff as corpses at the greatest distance the frame will allow, of serious infants held by women in severe dresses. In bundles, sheaves of magazines becoming one moist lump; balls of string, baby clothes of cracked satin and ragged lace, shoes curling tongue to heel—homogenized, all of it velvety to the touch, turning in the thick air of wet coughs and tea, the thing they all once were—paper to pulp, cloth to fiber, ashes to ashes. 9i Old Women Old women sit like hens over their soft bundles, nest and nurseryof their last days, letting the effluence of memory, its pungent odor of decay work through the clogged channels of their brains, presiding over their days like an opium dream. 92 ...