Page 126 of The End of the World As We Know It
Maybe Captain Trips was making music in Las Vegas after all. Maybe he was.
But until then, Lev would try his hardest to figure out the chords to songs like “Casey Jones” and “Bertha,” “Dire Wolf” and “Wharf Rat.” And the more he tried, the more he kept singing the song that, like the crow, just wouldn’t leave him alone.
“I… love… the… dead…”
And the day he figured out the notes of the walk-down was the same day he took the steps outside back to the sidewalk.
On his way then to Las Vegas.
Just as the crow had told him.
MILAGROS
Cynthia Pelayo
Blood smeared on banana leaves, and a dusty sun. That’s what I have. That’s what I see.
That’s all I have, I guess. Maybe that’s all that’s left?
Well, that and Choco.
I hear them just now, cawing, trying to scare me, but I don’t see them. They’re close though.
I know it.
I’m looking out the window of the concrete block school building. I don’t see anything except a few bodies, little kids whose parents didn’t come to get them in time so they could die at home. Instead, they just died here at school. This school is just a short walk from the beach. I wondered as they were coughing, their fevers raging, if they wished they could just get out there to the water, the ocean calming their bodies before their lives ended.
I didn’t attend school here.
I attended school far from here, way up in the mountains and somehow Choco and I got down and found this place. We walked.We cried. My feet stung with blisters, and when that happened, I’d just hug Choco and hold amilagroin my hand.
For parts of our trek, we didn’t take the road. Instead, we walked through the jungle. I held Papi’s machete tight in my hand, whipping and chopping away at leaves as big as my head, bigger.
We crossed streams, and I stopped at the waterfall Salto Collores and I washed up there with Choco. It felt sad to be there alone. The last time I was there was with all of my classmates. Things in your life can change so fast, the night taking away all you love, replacing their voices with hacking coughs, their kisses with thick green mucus, and their hugs with bloated bodies.
The sickness took so much.
My bed is the teacher’s desk. I have a few blankets here on top of it for a cushion, and coloring books and crayons. With me I also have a prayer card of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of Adjuntas, my town, the white rosary Tía Nelida gifted me on my communion, and some silvermilagrocharms from our home altar I keep in a little velvet pouch, my pink backpack where I store everything, and Choco, my pet chicken.
She’s asleep beside me.
I can almost hear the whooshing of the ocean waves and it fills me with so much peace, but terror, too.
And then I hear it, the harsh caw.
Choco lets out a loudcluck.
“I know, Choco, I don’t like those birds, either,” and when I say this, one appears, flapping its wings on a branch.
“They’re back,” I whisper. Another crow flies down from the sky and stands on the body of a little girl. Her face is turned away from me, but I can see her neck is bulged and blue and green. A thick yellow paste of vomit is dried and clumped in her hair.
In time, she’ll rot and liquify. They all do. The heat isn’t kind to the decomposing bodies of Puerto Ricans.
I attended high school with Karla and Jonathan, Francisco andMrs. Reyes. Mrs. Reyes was just a few years older than us. Her name was Socorro. Her parents died when their car veered off a sharp turn heading into the mountains. Jonathan said their bodies were there so many days, and with the heat and humidity, by the time a group of men from the pueblo went down to check, all they found were slime and bones.
The mountain isn’t so kind to bodies, and there’s a lot of bodies rotting on the island now.
Mrs. Reyes was the first one who started coughing.
