Cuento de Mi Id

“Love in Bain”

The hot bath water pressed down upon Diana's less-than-flat stomach like an insistent hand. It surrounded her limbs and pubes -- even her torso -- and would have covered her neck and head if she had allowed it.

But she did not allow it. She had kept it at bay -- just as she had kept her ex-husband Dennis at bay. The water flowed into orifices of Diana's body that only Dennis had known. Flowed there because Diana allowed it to flow there. She and the water became one in a way that she and Dennis had never become. Yet she still remained Diana.

That was important to her. Dennis had never wanted her to be Diana. He had wanted her to be “Diane” -- that giggly little creature she had been in the early days of their marriage. The one who shied away from confrontation. Who depended upon Dennis to kill the mouse. Who preformed oral sex when Dennis wanted to have oral sex without ever getting so much as a back rub in return. That Diane was gone. Drowned within her flesh. Instead there was now Diana. Cool. Calm. Assertive.

Taking a hot bath in the middle of the afternoon because she wanted to take a hot bath. Not another hot shower like the ones she took before she went to work. Those were over all too quickly, and no matter how long she spent taking them, she always felt a chill when she got out. As if the water had flowed over her, not into her.

Baths were different. You could take a hot bath in the dead of winter, and if you stayed in long enough, you could get out without shivering. You just didn't soak in the water. You became the water. Your body's temperature and the bath water's temperature became one. You didn't lie there, naked, waiting for someone to hold you, waiting for an embrace that never came....

Enough fretting about the past. Almost time to get out of the tub.

Diana still had weekend errands to run today. Shops to visit. Groceries to buy. Weeds to uproot. Dry cleaning to pick up.

She glanced at her scattered clothing and imagined going to the mall to buy a whole new wardrobe. Perhaps that blue dress she had seen at Joske's. Or the red dress in the front window at Dillard's. Or perhaps she could just go there as she was now -- without a stitch on. Just walk through the mall naked and watch the customers squirm in embarrassment and avert their eyes. Converting to nudism would no doubt help her save a fortune on her clothing costs. However, her heating bills would probably go through the roof come wintertime.

And in any event, why stay here?

If one were going to be naked, why not migrate to a warmer climate?.

She imagined herself naked on a beach at Cancun. Mariachis were playing in the distance, and dark-skinned men were dragging reluctant señoritas up a nearby pyramid.

Strange. She never realized that there were pyramids in this location...

Perhaps Egypt.

Egypt where the sand invaded every orifice and the smart women learned to shave down there for sanitary reasons. A whip was cracking over a relucant work crew in the distance. A naked servant was massaging her weary back. She looked into a brass mirror -- and saw all the worries of the world reflected in her eyes...

Diana was old. And growing old. But she had not really lived yet. She had not even seen the Library of Alexandria. But no, the Christians had burned that down just last year. No, the Muslims did. Never mind. The two cults always blamed each other as cults always do. And crawling across the floor was a scarab. She looked at the scarab and remembered...

Lying outside a villa near Pompeii.

Mount Vesuvius was smoking in the distance, and one of the maids was talking about a possible eruption. Impossible, Diane said. The volcano has been quiet for years.

Besides, she added, gesturing towards her lares and penates, do you think that these would ever let any harm come to me?

Meanwhile, the outside sky began to fill with ash...

Diana was modeling for the great sculptor Praxiteles, and the studio was cold. There was a draft upon her body she did not care to think about, and she hoped that the old man's fee was worth it. To be immortalized in art, he had said. And yet her stomach rumbled.

Forget art, Diana thought. One life is enough for me. Just let me be prosperous in this one. And not end up like the aged ones who started out in the temples of Aphrodite and ended up becoming priestesses of Artemis...

The revolution was coming.

Diana's lover was upon her. He still had her cunt in his mouth when the mob burst through the bedroom door. They dragged them both out by their hair and made her kiss the severed head of her dead maid-servant. Then, of course, they threw her onto the wagon...

They wanted answers, of course. But Diana did not have anything to tell them.

That did not matter to the Inquisition. One of her neighbors had known something and now they wanted confirmation. They tested her with a pin, searching for a spot on her body where there was no pain, and instead they found that her body had an infinite number of spots that were sensitive to the touch of a pin. They stripped her naked so that their search would be more thorough and then they cursed her for her nakedness.

Then they showed Diana the tub.

They showed her the tub.

The tub. Where she lay awaiting a summons from the Grand Sultan. A black eunuch scrubbed her back and a white eunuch caressed her toes. Briefly Diana thought of another tub.

Then she forgot it...

Then she remembered it...

Then forgot it...

She had no life now that her husband had been killed in battle. Now she was the sultan's wife. One of them, at least. Or at least she was a concubine. Or a...

The tub, she thought. Something is within the tub. A dark shape. A mosaic, perhaps. It looked like...

A wasserliche. That's what they called it in German. But it was still a dead body. Diana glanced at the innocent young face and regretted having stayed so long at the factory. If only she had come home sooner, her daughter would not have died. She would have been --

But wait...

Diana had no daughter...

Yes, she did. She remembered giving birth to her. She remembered the fun she had conceiving her, and the pain she felt when her husband was killed in the war, and the misery she had felt trying to get by in the dark time afterwards...

And yet...

A bird flew overhead. It was a raven...

She pictured herself in the raven's place and seeing with a raven's eyes...

She saw a distant city ahead...

Then a distant ocean...

Then a distant harbor...

There was a lady in the harbor...

A tall, green maiden with a big torch and a spiked helmet...

And within the city, there was a skyscraper...

On the skyscraper was a balcony...

The balcony led to an apartment...

The apartment had a bathroom...

The bathroom door was only halfway open, but she could see that the room was occupied by someone taking a bath. Or at least someone who had been taking a bath but who had apparently fallen asleep while doing so...

She started to brush the curtain aside. But the curtain would not yield to her fingertips even though she was once again human...

However, she could step through the bathtub curtain and look down upon the tub's occupant...

Look down and see a middle-aged, heavyset brunette floating like Ophelia upon the waters...

Only this brunette was not quite floating...

In fact, her head was under water...

Diana gasped. That body in the water was her...

She once again reached out, this time in desperation. But her hands passed right through the body in the tub. They passed through everything, in fact. And as her hands passed through the bath water, she could tell that the water was really quite cold -- as if it had been sitting there for a long, long time...

. Now what do I do? Diana thought.

What could she do?

And yet...

No more periods, she thought.

No more weight problems.

And, of course, no more ex-husband to worry about.

Why should she complain?.

She was free now. .

Hadn't she always wanted to be free?.

Not like this, she thought.

Then she once more glanced down at her body.

Remembered the sensation of the warm bath water upon her skin and within her genitals.

Oh, well, Diana thought. Now I have all time and space before me. Come to think of it, who really needs a body anyway? Had I not just traveled quite a long way just using my mind?

Diana walked off and tried to imagine herself wrapped in silk.

But for some reason, she still felt naked.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Eyes of a Revolutionary”

Never trust a revolutionary, my father used to say. You have only to look into their eyes to see what they really are. For their eyes aren't normal eyes. And they look right through you as if you weren't really human. Which readily explains the things they say. And the things they do.

I never laughed at my father when he said this. I could tell by the expression in his own eyes that he was serious about this. He would joke about a lot of things but never this subject. He never told me how he knew all this. Did he read from a book somewhere or did he learn it from someone who had lived through the last revolution in his homeland? He never said. But each time he told it to me, he had the air of someone revealing a great truth.

And, of course, he never told me in front of anyone else. Not even my mother.

*************************************************************************************************************

Five years into the War and my mother and I were staying at her mother's house. The news was always on and my mother was tired of always having to work two jobs. We had not seen my father in ages but my mother still jumped when the phone rang. Her mother always scolded us whenever we got home late but my mother ignored her. And tried to ignore the black sedan parked outside across the street...

*************************************************************************************************************

My father used to tell me about the old woman he knew back in his hometown. How contemptuous she had been of the last batch of revolutionaries to ride through that town and how much she liked to compare them to the men in uniform that she had known in her youth.

“The French, you see, now they knew something about uniforms. But today's bunch... They're little more than barbarians. How awful!”

My father was home early because the boss had decided to let him go. He had been working at the office six months -- longer than some of his Anglo co-workers -- but in the end, they let him go.

My mother asked him in whispers what he will do next.

“Don't worry, mi amor,” he said. "I'll find something.”

“But if you don't...”

“If I don't, we'll move.”

“And if you still don't find something...”

“Then we'll move again.”

Five years later, my father took us both aside and said that the two of us were going back to Detroit to live with my mother's mother. My father would follow but not for a long time. In the meantime we were not to mention his name or speculate where he might be. He made us both swear that we would never tell anyone about him.

“If anyone asks about me,” he said, “You don't know. If anyone claims to know something about me, you don't know. As far as you know, I went away one day and did not come back. Believe me, mijo, as much as I would like to pretend otherwise, it's better this way.”

He hugged both of us quite strongly and then left. I have not seen him in the flesh since then.

*************************************************************************************************************

My grandmother was talking about the news again but my mother would not listen. “Shut it off, mother,” she said. “It's almost time to eat.”

“Why do they do it?" my grandmother asked. “Why do they act like such ingrates? Don't those people understand the concept of loyalty?”

My mother seemed on the verge of saying something but instead she cleared her throat and said, “Loyalty is a two-way street, mother.” Then she fell silent as if she had accidentally confessed something.

Outside across the street, a black sedan was still waiting. Every so often, it drove off, only to be replaced almost immediately by a vehicle of a similar color. What the men in the car were waiting for, my mother would not say. As far as she was concerned, the sedan did not even exist.

*************************************************************************************************************

When my father was still living with us, he used to teach me English using flash cards. He would write down English words and sentences and then teach me to say them over and over again until l could say them in my sleep. He was never prouder till the day came when I no longer spoke with an accent.

He used to go to old book stores throughout the city and buy books about the last revolution in his homeland. He often said that he preferred the books that were written by Americans because the books written by people of his homeland tended to be more personality-oriented. Americans were not always as objective about the revolution as my father would like, but at least they tended to focus more on what actually happened as opposed to what so-and-so did or said. “Of course, the way things are going in this country,” he would sometimes joke, “American history books will someday be the same way. But hopefully neither you nor I will be around when that happens.”

*************************************************************************************************************

Last night there was a knock on the door.

A man in a black raincoat said we would have to leave. There had been an incident at the local nuclear plant and the entire neighborhood was being evacuated.

“I just knew they should have dealt with those people while they had the chance,” said my grandmother.

My mother just held her breath and fingered her rosary.

As we packed up to leave, I noticed that the black sedan was no longer across the street. Nor was there any car in its place. I finished packing my suitcase and took it out to my grandparents' car.

My grandmother was looking worriedly toward the north -- in the direction of the fallen power plant.

My mother as always looked in all directions.

Then she got into the back seat beside me and hugged me.

She said something in Spanish but her voice was so low that I could not hear her.

The next day, after we entered the relocation camp, my grandparents bought a newspaper. On the cover was a sketch of a man who looked like my father. But it could not have been my father for my father's eyes were brown and the man in the sketch had black irises. More to the point, the eyes in the newspaper sketch seemed to look right through me. Just like the eyes that my father had once described. The eyes of a revolutionary.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Living”

They were talking again. Talking about the damned story. Morales knew he should say something, but he was tired. He had been working extra shifts at Great Lake Steel again and he really did not have the patience to sit here and listen to silly chatter while his whole body cried out for sleep. It was a quarter to nine and already he was hoping that the class would end early so that he could go home and catch a few moments of slumber before he had to start the graveyard shift. His mother would probably still be up when he got home; she usually was, no matter how late he came home. But with luck, he would be able to catch a quick nap, regardless.

And yet the voices kept yammering.

Morales felt the need to scream but he knew that if he gave in, he would never hear the end of it from his guidance counselor. Besides, if he said something, he might get into trouble, and he already had enough problems at home without seeking them here at school as well.

So instead he forced himself to listen.

“The ending,” said the blonde girl ahead of him. “It was so sad.”

“Yeah,” said a red-headed guy across from her. “Just think about it. That poor boy just singing in the snow. Just dying for want of love.”

You think that's sad, Morales thought, try listening to some of the real-life stories I could tell you. The father who died of a heart attack when his youngest son turned thirteen. The older brother who died of appendicitis because there was no money to take him to a doctor until it was too late. The other older brother whose first wife and son died of tuberculosis while he was at work.

But the people in the classroom didn't want to hear stories like that. They wanted to hear happy stories about people just like them. People who had no real problems save philosophical ones. Sad, rich people who had a hundred servants to do their bidding and yet wept quite frequently because they lived in such a sad, sad world.

He knew he was being unfair now. He knew that some of his fellow students were on scholarships too, and probably came from families just as poor as his.

But he was too tired to be fair. He just wanted to go home so that he could grab a few hours of sleep.

The teacher was talking now. Talking about the difference between dying young and not dying young. As if that issue really required a lot of thought.

To deliberately die young like the boy did in the story was stupid. A smart person avoids it if he can and he is certainly not dumb enough to go out and seek it on purpose.

Only the well-off glamorize death, he thought. Only the rich could afford to cry crocodile tears over cute young Irish lads who die way before their time because they're too stupid to come in out of the snow. Only the rich could afford to spit on those who are not dumb enough to die young and who prefer to show their love by staying healthy and sharing their good fortune with their beloved for many years instead of offering one brief and stupid romantic gesture for the sum of one night.

Such folk were never appreciated by the rich because the rich do not want to appreciate such folk. They hate being reminded of what it's like to be poor -- actually poor -- and while they will weep forever over some imaginary person's troubles, they generally could be counted on to do damned little to help out a real person.

But then they have no real idea what it is like to be not rich. To not have money. To have to work so hard and to earn so little and to never have enough of anything.

He thought of his widowed mother who was waiting at home this very moment and the many times she had reminded him and his siblings about the life she had known before she had been dispossessed by the Revolution. Whenever one of them would bring home a bottle of wine to celebrate a birthday, their mother would say, “When I was a little girl, we used to celebrate with champagne, not wine.” And then she would say nothing else.

Somehow he got the feeling that she would have liked the story the class was talking about.

But he never would.

The yammering was continuing and he tried to ignore it by telling himself that it was just a story. No more important than the stories his co-workers would tell on lunch break or even the stories his mother would tell of her own girlhood. He did not have to agree with the others about it. In fact, he was better off ignoring it.

Then he noticed the silence.

“Anything to add, Mr. Morales?” the teacher asked.

Morales blinked. The class was looking at him and the teacher kept staring at him as if expecting something. Morales knew he should say something neutral but instead he said, “This story is stupid.”

He relished the shocked look on his classmates' faces as they cried “What?” in unison and then he continued.

“The woman in the story -- she spent all those years in love with this dead guy she didn't even like at first and yet she had no love for the spouse who had worked for years to put food on her table and a roof over her head. In my mind, that's a stupid story.”

The teacher just smiled. “I'm sorry you have so little appreciation for great literature, Mr. Morales. Perhaps when you're older and you know more about life, you will appreciate it more.”

There was so much more Morales could have said at that moment yet he stayed silent. Somehow he didn't see himself having the words to make either the teacher or the class understand. Perhaps no one had such words. But especially not him.

Instead he just waited silently for the dismissal bell to ring. When it did, he quietly gathered up his books and walked out into the winter cold.

Cuento de Mi Id

“Blanca”

Blanca is knitting another sweater for me tonight. She knits something new every night yet she never finishes any of them.

Sometimes I joke with her that her mother should have named her Penelope. But she just smiles and glances at me with those ebony eyes of hers.

Arabic eyes, I call them. After five centuries, the long-dead Arabs of Spain still live on in a young woman’s eyes. Blanca’s eyes. The eyes of the prettiest woman in San Narciso.

*************************************************************************************************************

How I first met Blanca, I shall not say. Suffice it to say that as it is with many men of Mexican descent, it was a female relative of mine who saw her first and eventually introduced us. No paseo scene for me. The minute I first saw her entering her mother’s pharmacy, I fell in love with her. And I like to think that eventually she will fall in love with me. In time.

Our first meetings were at best platonic. I would visit her house and say hello to her mother and her younger siblings. Her younger brother would fetch me an apple which I would not eat and a Coke which I would not drink and after a while, we would go upstairs to the living room to talk. Of course Blanca’s brother was always coming up to check on us and I would like to think that in some ways, the little twelve-year-old relished the role of chaperone he was playing. Blanca, for all her beauty, did not look like she dated much, and at her age (27), she seemed an obvious candidate for Mexican spinsterhood. After all, most Mexican women married at far younger ages than Blanca -- even in the States. To make matters worse, three of her younger sisters were already wearing engagement rings. So, needless to say, my courtship of Blanca seemed a welcome event.

Yet Blanca herself seemed strangely reluctant to talk of marriage. Of parties and weddings, yes, but only if they were someone else’s. As for herself, she seemed content to do little more than knit and make small talk.

This frustrated me. I knew by all the framed diplomas on the wall of Blanca’s room that she was not a dumb person, and indeed, she had talked many times of all the sights she had seen when she had visited a married cousin living in San Francisco. Clearly, she was not the type of woman to be content spending the rest of her life in a small town. But she acted like it. Moreover, I knew that she liked me.

However, she always changed the subject whenever I spoke of marriage.

Yes, she was willing to think of a more serious relationship, she would say, but not now.

Had I met her back home in the States, I might have suspected that there was another man involved, but in truth, I seemed to be the only male non-relative involved in her life. Which puzzled me eventually. Could it be that for all her talk of marriage and children, Blanca did not really want to get married. And if so, why not?

A number of unflattering hypotheses came into my mind, but I rejected every one of them, one by one. Blanca showed no signs of romantic interest in her own sex. Nor did she seem destined for the convent. Her mother talked long and admiringly about my computer job in the States, so there were no objections on that front. As for her father, he had passed away about three years ago. Even the novios of her younger sisters seemed to like me. So what was the problem?

I made up my mind to ask Blanca about this one night when we were walking home from a party.

Her brother had come with us as a chaperone, but like most males, he was smart enough to walk a yard or two ahead of us -- enough room to give us privacy without compromising his sister’s virtue too much.

So as we passed through the deserted streets of downtown San Narciso, I gathered the courage to ask Blanca the fatal question: Why?

She glanced at me.

Then she glanced into the windows of a jewelry store.

“What lovely rings they have,” she said in Spanish.

I glanced at her.

“Please don’t change the subject,” I said in the same language.

She glanced at me, then at her brother, still a yard or two ahead of us. “We must not talk about it.”

“We must.”

“No, we must not.” She paused to glance at me, then she continued. “I -- I like you very much, Anton, but I cannot be engaged to you.”

“But why?” The words sounded much more anguished in Spanish.

“I -- I just cannot.”

She glanced into another store window.

“Did anyone in my family ever tell you about my first boyfriend?”

“I didn’t even know you had a first boyfriend. Aside from me, of course.”

She smiled. “This was long ago. When Papa was still alive. Papa never really liked him. In fact, he nearly threw him out of the house one time. He was a real bad sort.” She did not say to whom she was referring.

“So?”

“My boyfriend wanted me to elope with him. He had friends in Guadalajara, and if that did not work, we could always stay with his relatives in Morelia or San Luis Potosí. But I did not do that, of course.”

“Why not?”

She glanced into another store window. “I did not want to leave my family. I was the oldest, of course. And the oldest always has certain responsibilities. So he left without me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. A few months later, he tried the same thing with a girl in a nearby town. Her mother was one of those jealous sorts and had chased away one would-be novio with a gun. I hate to tell you what she did to my boyfriend.”

She smiled and then continued. “As for me, I really did not have much to say about the matter. I got very sick that year and spent much of that fall in bed. At one point, my parents even called in a priest and had him give me the last rites.”

She turned toward me with a smile and pointed to a small circular scar on her forearm.

“But I am much better now.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Don’t be. I nearly died.”

“I’m sorry. I once nearly died too.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “You have told me about the heart operation you had when you were a child. This was different. I really did almost die. Only my father saved me at the last minute.”

“He did? How?”

“With a silver coin. He heated it in an open fire and then placed it on my arm. If he had not done that, they would have buried me.”

“My God!”

“All these years, I’ve always wanted to pay him back for saving my life. But I never got the chance. And he never really forgave me for it either.”

“He never forgave you? But why? It was not your fault. You just said you were sick.”

“No, I did not.”

“But you just said -- ”

“I said I got sick. From taking too many sleeping pills from my parents’ pharmacy. Now do you understand?”

I glanced at her. Surely in this day and age, she could not be that Catholic. And yet something in the way she held her head seemed to warn me. Between her black hair and her light brown skin, she seemed to almost merge into the darkness behind her.

I suddenly realized that her brother was no longer in sight of us. I looked around for him.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “He’s gone home.”

“But why?”

“We have been courting long enough for him to trust us. And he knows that you are a most respectable man.”

“Then why did he accompany us tonight?”

“Because I asked him to. In case I was tempted.”

She walked on a bit. “I can’t ever come back to Dallas with you. And you could never be happy in San Narciso. So it would be best for you to forget me. Go home and find yourself some nice American girl. I am not worth it.”

“But you are,“ I said. “You are very beautiful.”

She laughed. “It takes more than beauty to make a marriage.”

“I know. That is why I want to marry you. Because I do not want just another mindless beauty. I want someone I could spend my entire life with. I want you.”

She looked at me again. “I do believe you are serious.”

“I am.”

She smiled.

“Blanca,” she said, as if quoting. “The woman with a name like snow.”

She smiled again. “My boyfriend made that up.”

“I see.”

“No, you do not. You do not know me that well, Anton. If you did, you would not dream of me. Must I deny you three times before the cock crows? Very well. I’ll show you why you must go back to Dallas and forget me. I will show you right here... right now.”

From out of her purse she took two knitting needles. She held them up before her so that their sharp tips gleamed in the moonlight, then plunged them into her left hand. She never so much as flinched.

“Do you understand now?”

“No. I do not.”

She drew out the needles. There was blood on their tips. Already her hand was bleeding.

I reached over to cover it with a handkerchief.

She pushed me back.

“You are a fool, Anton. A well-meaning fool, but a fool nonetheless. I can never love you. You know that as much as I do.” And with that, she wiped off the needles with a piece of old cloth she had and placed them all back in her purse. Then she drew out a multicolored handkerchief. She covered her hand with it and then disappeared into the darkness.

“You are a fool, Anton,” she kept saying as she disappeared. “You are a fool.”

*************************************************************************************************************

I wish I could say that I went back to the States right after that and forgot her. But as I have pointed out, she is with me now even as I speak.

While I could not influence her, I could influence her mother, and Blanca, as always, was the type of good Catholic girl who always obeyed her mother.

So she sits in the corner of our bedroom, knitting like she always knits, the sun illuminating the side of her face to the point that she almost looks Anglo.

I kiss her every now and then and murmur, “Te adoro.” But she never murmurs “te adoro” back. She is determined to stay with me and be a good girl, but she will not pretend she enjoys it.

If that were the worst element of our life together, I would not object. For aside from her knitting, Blanca has made remarkably great progress in her adjustment to Dallas. Too great.

Every now and then, I see her wear a short-sleeved dress and witness the nail marks on her arms. I think of how few cats I have seen in the neighborhood and of how many pet-owning families have moved out of the neighborhood in the last year or so.

She keeps swearing that she will change, but I swear that her resolutions, alas, are all too much like her sweaters -- easily begun but never quite capable of holding her interest.

This worries me.

For lately, you see, she has begun to talk about children.

She has begun to talk about children a lot.

Cuento de Mi Id

“The Mourning After”

He hadn’t wanted to attend the funeral, and already he regretted the fact that he had.

His bedroom smelled like something had died there, and his skull was afire with the granddaddy of all hangovers. Evidently he had gotten drunk last night. But what happened afterward was still blank.

He remembered seeing John there at the church and blaming him silently for the miscarriage which had taken Maggie’s life. After all, it should have been him that Maggie married, not John, and if John had not gotten her pregnant, she would have eventually changed her mind.

Instead she had been stolen by the ultimate suitor, and all his years of waiting were wasted. There was no divorce from the Grim Reaper. Not even a trial separation. And it was all John’s fault.

He knew he shouldn’t think that way. After all, thoughts could be as real as bullets. His father had told him that. But then his father had also believed in the mal de ojo, the Mexican evil eye. If that was real, John would have been dead by now.

The smell grew stronger in his bedroom. Then he turned and noticed a shape beneath the sheets on the other side of the bed. Evidently, he had gotten lucky last night. How ironic.

He had started to reach for his companion when his fingers brushed against a cold, dirt-covered hand bearing a familiar ring.

It was then that he remembered what he had done last night.

He closed his eyes and screamed. He did not wish to remember any more. It was just an illusion; Maggie wasn’t really there. When he opened his eyes, she would be gone.

But when he squeezed her cold hand involuntarily, she was still there. And that was not the worst part.

The worst part came when she squeezed back.

Cuento de Mi Id

“A Specter Is Haunting Gotham”

(I have written only three stories thus far that can be considered fanfic--four if you count this one. This is one of those stories. Of course, it can also be considered alternative history -- in a way.)

It moves through the urban darkness, a figure in white, so swift, so silent that any observer would think it either a hallucination or an illusion. But it is neither. You see, a specter is haunting Gotham.

A sound of movement stirs below. The figure in white pauses, crouching like a skeleton in the darkness. Then it leaps out into the night... out... and down... into the alley where three toughs in black jackets are accosting a young girl.

“Hey, baby, what are you doing out this time of night?” one of them says.

“Please,“ she says. “Please leave me alone. I’ll give you money.”

The thugs smile “Money isn’t what we want...”

“And we have no intention of leaving you alone...”

They do not notice him at first.

They have their minds set upon more important things.

Then...

“Hey, Billy,” one of them cries out. “Over there.”

The young hoods turn. Fingers snap. Three switchblades appear as if by magic.

“I don’t know what you’re doing in this neighborhood, mister, but you’d best scram.”

Beneath its white hood, the figure smiles. But from their point-of-view, it does not appear to hear. The muggers close in, expecting an easy target.

Then the figure moves. And three of Gotham City’s toughest find out what it means to be on the receiving end of a beating for a change.

When it is over, the figure in white walks over to the young woman. She stares at him, looking as terrified of him as she was of her would-be assailants.

“Who are you?” she asks.

If the figure’s features were discernible beneath its hood, one would almost detect a smile. But no reply is made. And the figure vanishes upwards into the darkness, leaving behind three battered corpses which were once men.

At dawn, the figure in white reaches a large mansion on the edge of town. Entering through the usual underground entrance, he is greeted by his faithful butler, Arthur.

“Rough night on the town, sir?” he mutters in a stiff, impeccable British manner.

He does not really expect an answer.

“Passable, Arthur,” says the figure. “Passable.”

He leaves him to enter the changing room where he doffs his nocturnal costume and prepares for the day ahead. As he showers and bathes, removing unwelcome traces of the night’s exertions, he contemplates the past which led him to his present nighttime activity. About his parents, long-dead, slain by unknown parties and how a youthful vow of vengeance against the murderers had led to a lifetime obsession with ridding the world of criminals.

It had been a long time since that night when he had first donned the white costume and gone out in search of evil-doers. And every night he feels older -- as if the cold wind of old age and its subsequent partner, death, were blowing down his spine.

He shivers unconsciously and wishes for the umpteenth time that he could see himself in a shaving mirror...

Cuento de Mi Id

“Skeleton Girl”

(Callie was one of the first female characters I invented. One of the dreams she had in this story was based on a dream I once had.)

Callie took her clothes off. Stood in front of the mirror. Her ribs looked like a xylophone. Her face like a skull. Her skin was white, too white, but there was a fever in her brain that seemed to compensate for it. Her arms looked like sticks, and she could see parts of her collarbone that she had never seen before.

But it was not enough.

She was still too fat.

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She got up the next morning. Ate an egg for breakfast. Only one egg, but she did it because only dumb girls starved themselves and she was not dumb. She took a quick shower. Afterward, she shivered as she put her clothes on and she never used to shiver. But she shrugged it off.

On the way to school, some radio preacher started talking about creationism and about how if evolution was in fact a reality we’d be seeing mutations all about us. She laughed and changed the station.

The radio started playing an old Robert Palmer song, and she sang along with it. Then it played a song about somebody’s imaginary lover, and then she suddenly stopped singing. Instead she changed the station.

She arrived at school, and her stomach started rumbling. She promised herself she wouldn’t break down and go to the school cafeteria. She didn’t.

Halfway through algebra class, her stomach started rumbling again. It was only ten o’clock, and lunch seemed so far away. She silently cursed the teacher for not letting her out early. Then she cursed the clock for not ticking faster. It was probably a few minutes slow, she told herself. She congratulated herself on her keen insight.

She was so hungry when lunchtime rolled around that she was tempted to buy out the whole cafeteria. But she didn’t. She brought an apple so she ate an apple. After all, if it was good enough for Eve...

She took her time eating the apple, but it still wasn’t enough. Her stomach craved something more. Down boy, she said. You’re just going to have to train yourself to do without.

School was over. Time for work. She punched in at three-thirty, and smiled at Billy. Billy didn’t smile back. Billy was talking to Karen again, and she didn’t like Karen.

She took her stand behind the cash register, and pretended to be interested in her job. She reminded herself that this job was one reason she was going to college in the first place. End up like the fifty-year-old employees you met at the store meeting a few months back? That would be a living hell. Even Billy seemed to sense it. And she was sure he would have told her so if only she had ever got up the nerve to speak to him.

But she didn’t get up the nerve. And she never will -- as long as she looked as she did. Once she lost more weight, things would be easier. Billy would be talking to her instead of Karen, and boys would be turning their heads in her direction when she walked through the mall, and girls would be envying her left and right.

But she wasn’t quite thin enough yet. Just a few more weeks...

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The weeks flew by. The pounds came off more slowly than they did a month ago. Perhaps it was the food she had been eating, she thought. Perhaps if she switched to a liquid diet...

She started having nightmares in which she raided the refrigerator and ended up going on a non-stop eating spree. The next morning, she woke up in a panic until she realized that it was all just a dream. She smiled with relief as she stepped on the scale and confirmed that she hadn’t gained weight. But then she hadn’t lost weight, either. This fact depressed her.

At the store, a customer asked her if she was sick, and she took it as a compliment.

She almost blacked out when she was putting up light bulbs, and she considered that a compliment as well.

Soon they would be envying her at the mall. Heads would turn as she walked by, and every guy there would be asking her for her phone number. Billy would be staring at her -- yes, her, not Karen or those other girls he used to go with before he met Karen -- and he would ask her out, and he would take her to a fine restaurant with white tablecloths and silver candlesticks, and then he would propose, and she would say yes, and then --

But then she woke up.

The dreams she had at night started to change in nature. She started dreaming about scarecrows and skeletons. She pictured a parade of ghouls in black, ragged clothing fetching something white from a river and feasting upon it. Then they tumbled the leftovers into the city reservoir. She did not know what this dream meant.

Her father confronted her one day at the breakfast table. He asked her to start eating more. You’re losing too much weight, he said. To lose so much weight so fast was bad for the heart.

She smiled and reassured him that she would eat more. Then she sneered at him behind his back, and asked why he didn’t worry so much about her when she was overweight. Could it be that her ability to lose weight so easily actually threatened him? Who could imagine a spineless wimp like her having so much willpower? Soon the heads would turn to look at her in the mall, and she would feast with Billy upon white tablecloths, and she would be able to eat anything she wanted, and Billy would look at her, not Karen, at her, not Karen, at her, not Karen, at her, not Karen...

Then one night she showed up for work, and Billy was not there. He had apparently quit, along with Karen.

The next day, Karen showed up, bragging about her engagement ring. If that was not bad enough, Callie heard rumors that Karen had already bragged about being pregnant. But that could not be, she thought. Not her and Billy. It had to be a mistake. It just had to be.

She found herself tempted to eat when she got home. She held off. No way was she going back to the days when she solved every problem by putting something in her stomach. But someone had already put something in Karen’s stomach. And now there was no going back.

The next day, Billy showed up. Karen was not with him. Callie pretended not to notice him. But she managed to be outside when he finally left, and she met him in the parking lot. She wanted to ask him if it was true. But she did not. She just stared at the concrete, and offered Billy congratulations. Then she smiled when he suggested he might come by the store again.

She knew she was not ever going to see him again. But for some reason, she thought she had scored a victory.

She drove home and thought about pigging out. Instead, she got a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. She took them out, one by one, Then she lined them up on the bathroom counter, one by one. Then she took them, one by one.

Thought you weren’t going to solve your problems by putting things in your stomach, she asked herself.

Shut up, she answered.

She started dreaming about white tablecloths and silver candlesticks and black, ragged clothing and heads turning at the mall and being able to eat anything she wanted...

When she woke up, the last thing she wanted to do was look at a mirror. She felt quite sure that she looked quite horrible. After all, she had come to hate that increasingly pale image she had seen in the glass for the last three months. But, in the end, she did not have to worry about it. She walked over to the bathroom to wash her face, and, lo and behold, she did not have a reflection in the mirror. Great. She was tired of looking at herself in the mirror anyway.

More importantly, she did not even feel hungry. The food in the family refrigerator no longer tempted her. Not even her mother's lasagna -- which used to be her favorite dish -- tempted her. In fact, her stomach turned just at the thought of eating such stuff. And yet she felt so thirsty.

A thought occurred to her. Something about a thing which was thin, and pale, and hated mirrors, and never ate ordinary food. But the thought did not stay with her for long.

She was already thinking about that thirst of hers. And what she could possibly find to satisfy it...