My Cardboard Balcony

Making Dinner by Belinda Roddie Mama has a scar on her chin about the length of a cemetery - every mole and wart's a tombstone signifying each year of her life. She is a goddess, but she is aging like a mortal in the Mexican desert, the hot winds whittling away at her youth. She stirs rice and beans in a pot, and when the steam hits her face, she almost looks sixteen again. A fiesta in her childhood backyard, her father serving handmade enchiladas at a white plastic picnic table. A unicorn piñata lies half-mangled in the grass. One of its paper eyes is missing from its severed head. Mama tells me that story all the time, about how my little tío   shrieked in terror at the sight, and had to be taken to his room. Her arm pops and cracks with each swivel of her wooden spoon. I am standing at the kitchen table, halfway done with setting down the silverware, when I count the permanent runes on my own skin. One scar is from falling off my motorcycle, chasi...

"I'm just resting!" I tried to complain, but already I was being hoisted out of bed, thrown into a stiff, unyielding suit, and practically wheeled out of the room. I knew that this family reunion was important to my father, but that was the main problem I had: It was important only to my father. As I was sandwiched between my brother and sister in the backseat of my parents' Volvo, I was becoming convinced that the only way to get through this day was begging my grandfather to let me sneak sips of port from his glass when my mother wasn't looking.