I shared the dream I had of my grandmother’s hands peeling the skin off a wet almond. She plucked it swiftly from a bowl of water but the almond didn’t feel a thing, I said, I promise. The only sound was of the water reaching out with perfect circle arms towards the rim of the bowl.
We were sitting on her balcony and the warm buzz of the outside was breaking against our bodies and leaving delicate pink bursts on our skin.
Across the street a man who seemed to be pieced together with hand-me-down scraps of flesh and bone, was leaning against a half uprooted palm tree. He brought a brown paper bag to his face and tilted it up towards some unseen, quietly, churning constellation above his head. Whatever he was drinking drove his already gnarled face into ebbing convulsions under the blanketing shade of the palms.
The Valley, she sighed, the crater of Los Angeles, the gash where liquor stores and strip malls give birth to more liquor stores and more strip malls.
Now, come closer. Listen. I have poked out your grandfather’s eyes with my knitting needle one thousand times over, every photograph. And every sleep I would come at him from behind the door, from under the bed, from out the closet, and none of it, none of it, gave me peace.
The evil that men do, is no excuse for the evil that I do, and this is the truth.
Do you want one? she asked, pointing the bowl towards my chest. I woke up before my fingers dove into the water, before I had an almond in my grasp and before daylight spun godless into the gash.