Names Above Houses

When Fidelito Grows Up, Maria Elena Reads

76 When Fidelito Grows Up, Maria Elena Reads Despite failing eyesight, she looks up. She is tired from pouring over a history book. When she sees a pair of moth’s wings, her cataracts make them Fidelito’s tear-thick eyelashes from when he fell from a tree. And the shadows of moth-flight in the bald eye of the light bulb are her son, who drifts like a loose rag. They cause her to drop the book and feel wind from airborne pages. Now the moths rest and pose sayings to her in white quotation marks. There on the mural of trees with sepia branches, the insects grasp. The book, fallen to her feet, says that you can tell a man is having an affair by the angle of his shoulders. Maria Elena thinks the angle of a moth’s wings are the same: her son’s slouched eyebrows in concern. Now the home without a son is bare as a spoon. But the vines from his mouth-marks on her breast still ache. Once, to Fidelito, the weight of everything was measured by the angle of his mother’s arms. Too far and he starved, too close and his head hurt. The same was true for Maria Elena: too far and her world was full of sirens. His lips too close, and her aureolas felt like a hill of ants. Ants, she remembers, are the riddle. Their lives are always full of them. In a dream, Maria Elena believes that five ants learn the secret to fire. They pour into the room like rain and torch the mural of trees. They are jealous gods. ...