• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You see my caballito?” My horsey? “Come, sit on it, gordita. Take a bouncy ride.” His voice was light, but his face was stern, his neck tense, rigid as carved mahogany.

“No, Juan Díaz,” I said.

“Come play with me, niña. Sit on me. How can you say no? You didn’t say no to Antonio.”

I shook my head and slid back along the outskirts of my father’s town. My throat was dry, my knees soft.

Suddenly, he was hurtling toward me. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the floor. “I don’t want to play with you!” I screamed. The cement was cold. I could feel its grit under my skirt. He held me down and I struggled against him, pushing his knees with my feet. His lever was wagging in my face, a flailing part on a heavy machine. I reached up and took hold of it with both hands. He gasped.

And then I pulled down with all my might.

He bellowed and rolled over, clutching at his groin. I scooted back and brushed the hair out of my eyes. Then I scrambled up the steps to the kitchen door, pushed past, and shot through the house into my room.

I SAT ON my bed alone and trembled. I did not scream. I did not call for help. My brain inched forward, plowing through muck. What had Antonio told Juan Díaz? Had the truth, harmless as it was, done this to me? I had touched my friend once. I had shown him a place on my body. But that was all. Had a simple account of the facts been enough to send Juan Díaz after me? Or had Antonio embroidered the truth? Had he made our glancing encounter more than it was? Or, as I prefer to think, had Juan Díaz done the embroidering?

You didn’t say no to Antonio. That was true. I hadn’t. Antonio had told me no. Put it away, he had said, and then he had spoken of a greater force.

I kept my eyes on the door, expecting the messenger to burst in and wrestle me to the floor again. But time passed and nothing prowled the corridors save my own jangled mind. The toys George and I had played with that morning were still arrayed on the bed: a rifle, pink bullets, a bat. I stared at them, contemplating the message that had just been delivered. Had one man twisted another’s words? Or had my friend woven a tale so distorted, so ugly, that the messenger had sat there for years, stunned by this freak of nature, this child, this apotheosis of perversion? Had the two just laughed and slapped the table? Can you believe it? That little elf?

There was another possibility: That an event that had seemed natural three years before, devoid of anything but the simplest curiosity, had multiplied of its own accord. That my curiosity—however innocent—had violated something so forbidden, so unfathomable, that a sick air would follow forever. Pandora’s box. Lift that tiny top, stretch those baby fingers, pull that little skirt, then giggle and walk away. But what billows behind is toxic. What seems barely fleeting grows.

I had always known—from every scrap of myth and scripture that had been planted in my brain—that even seemingly inconsequential things had consequences. An apple could cast you from the garden. Not just you, but all your generations to follow. Here, peek at this, let me peek at that, and the toxins flow, evil multiplying on evil, hunting you down three years later. A man on a bicycle comes to collect.

Who can say where children get their resilience? Who can say how we put terror behind us and move down the road? I claim no special quality here beyond a blessed numbness, a realization that life was well outside my control. Fathers took new jobs, grandmothers died, parents squabbled, houses shrank, energy bubbles collided, poisons oozed, Campbell turned out to be Clapp, lions slipped out of their cages. The gift was to carry on.

So it was that when George whacked open my door and said, “Come on, let’s go!” I sighed and trotted after him, pulling our tin-pot armor behind. Juan Díaz was gone. He had left during the siesta. “Funny,” my mother commented, shaking her head, “I was so sure he was going to ask