Manguitos, Pears, Grapefruits
manguitos
puerto rico’s the land of my grandfather. whenever he talks about his childhood, the island treasures into golden sunsets & moons, into pandulce plazas & beaches where women who eat the sun walk around. no other place, he says, bleeds & blooms the sun. he hasn’t been back since he left for america some seventy years ago, & he says he’ll probably never go back; the past doesn’t want him. i didn’t figure out what he meant until the two children he left behind showed up to his house in michigan. full grown, with children of their own. he greeted them with warm kisses & tight hugs, but could only say la vida es un carnival when they asked him why he abandoned them. the same response didn’t work on my grandma. he couldn’t say a thing against grandma’s pockets full of no, no me des eso. i’m not your lungs. you can’t fill me up with clouds. they were never the same after that—which is why grandpa sits me down on the sofa, questions me about the boy in my room i claim is just a friend yet has left affections on my neck, & says, mijo, secrets taste good. sweet manguitos we hold in the back of our throat. but once someone else bites into what you’re hiding, you’ll be left on your knees, begging to dig it out of their mouth.
pears
it’s buzzcut season & the fluorescent hospital lights overhead are harsh—on me & the woodcut police officer, who keeps asking questions & questions & jotting down notes: did you know him? how did he get your clothes off? we’ll need to take evidence, is that okay? i don’t remember what i told him because i kept thinking my teardrops tasted like pears & how my body could still be sweet even when it’s been eaten. & then i time jump to my car, the sky bubbling in the morning through the windshield, & i’m hoarse & asking my stepmom for money, for medicine so i don’t get hiv, & her first question is, why were you with a man?
grapefruits
my dad says grapefruits remind him of young days, times when he’d sit under the tiger-striped sky after picking fruit in the fields with his father, who’d puff cigar clouds as they drove home until they both smelled of ash, not dirt. the best part about grapefruits, according to my dad, was digging into them, scooping sweetness out of their skin. he’d always joke my mother tried to do that to him when they were married, but she couldn’t break into him, which would make him smack his beer belly & proudly say, i got that peña blood. wood skin. i always wondered why i wasn’t the same—why my skin bruised & broke, but never hardened. i wondered if i had to journey out to the picking fields, harvest strawberries until all the softness in my body settled into the soil, just so i could leave with stone skin, prepared for anyone who tried scooping out my insides.
JJ Peña (@heckaseuss) is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has been published in Passages North. He was a finalist in SmokeLong Quarterly's Award for Flash Fiction, as well as the Neutrino Short Short Prize.