BREAK
A Spitfire story by Annie M. Pasquinelli
Mamá
stomped over the threshold that afternoon after Mass, as touchy and ready to
attack as a tigress with eczema.
Magdalena
sloped in after her. She hated it when Esperanza was gone. The lack of balance
always drove those remaining in the Guerrero household up the walls. Mamá would
grumble as she went about the house, growling and lashing out at anything and
everyone. Small mistakes in the completion of chores became towering nightmares
of retribution. Any smart remark became an act of mutiny that more often
doubled the already cruel level of punishment. Nothing slipped by her. Nobody
would be left unscathed.
Emiliana
pounded through the front door, dropped her purse and shoes by the hall closet,
and threw herself down at the kitchen table. When the house was missing its
smallest member, Emi always dove into her schoolwork. Maggie didn’t know how
community college worked, but she felt sure that midterms didn’t happen with
such frequency, nor that they required such prolonged hours of studying, like
her second oldest sister claimed to have done. Emi took over the worn oak
table, which was stacked comically high with books, papers, notecards, and various
office supplies. Though the columns looked like little more than organized
messes, they were really the precisely assembled pieces of a delicate and
dangerous doomsday device, ready to explode if even the smallest mound was moved
from its place. Emi was the mad scientist overseeing this dastardly creation,
tending to its sprawling branches, feeding it late into the night, shunning all
outside help.
Mamá,
after extricating herself from her tightly buckled wool jacket, caught one glance
of the discarded items on the floor, turned to look at Emi, and inhaled with a
sound like a hot teapot ready to boil. “Emiliana! Can’t you take two more seconds to put your things
away?”
Emi
half-stood above her chair so that her crazed glare could be seen over the
homework-monster’s back. “Mamá, I have at least three hours of reading for each
class before tomorrow. So no, I can’t take two more seconds to put my
things away.”
Maggie,
who was admittedly the first to jump into the fray when an argument arose
between any of the family members, withdrew into herself and stayed in sulky silence,
like she always did until her youngest sister returned. As she shut and dead
bolted the front door, she dreamed of the days not long past
when Esperanza was around to bug her with stupid questions about cartoons and
to cry her constant pleading supplication to play Barbies with her. If only they
could see Esperanza’s annoying little face again, Maggie thought, the cosmos
would fall back into alignment and peace would be restored to the home ravaged
by the wildfires of negative energy and misplaced aggression.
Her
mother snorted in anger. “I have hours of work left to do, too, mija! But
you’re going to make me take those two seconds instead? Are you really so
selfish?”
The
eye contact between the two women was tense enough to snap like a rubber band.
Maggie didn’t want to wait around to see if it would break like a rubber band,
too. The empty, quiet house had lain dormant in their absence that morning,
nursing its wounds, but Maggie hadn’t had the same opportunity. She wouldn’t be
their collateral damage again.
“Can’t
you just leave it alone?” Emiliana moaned. She dropped herself back onto the
chair again and reached to adjust the mounds of paper as though desperate to
ensure that her dark creation had not fallen apart in her absence. “I’ll put
them away if and when I have time, but only after my work is done! I shouldn’t
have even taken the time off to go to church this morning!”
Maggie
had snuck halfway to the closet behind Mamá, where she hoped to put her own
things away before retreating as quietly as possible. Her eyes widened when her
sister’s last statement echoed through the house like the warning sirens
wailing in advance of an air raid. There was no turning back now. Maggie knew
the argument would burn hotter and longer than napalm in wartime. Abandoning
all hope, she kept her things with her and fled on tiptoe up the hallway.
Behind
her, Mamá’s voice rose in a terrible crescendo. “Emiliana Josefina Guerrero, how dare you! You
will never put your homework above
the work of the Lord! There is nothing more important than your heavenly
salvation!”
As
Maggie reached the doorway of hers and Esperanza’s shared bedroom, she heard
the blast of her sister’s nuclear bomb rush toward her: “Dios mío, Mamá, God will not lock me out of heaven because I missed
one Sunday Mass!”
Horrified,
Maggie shut the bedroom door. She ripped off her high heels and pearls,
stripped to her underwear, and shoved her tight, itchy, prissy Sunday best into
a dark corner of her closet. She pulled on a rough t-shirt, running shorts, and
tennis shoes, and then loaded up her old drawstring bag with essentials. Water
bottle. Tracfone. Keys. Emergency rations. Fire resistant pouch.
She
scrawled a quick note on a torn-off piece of notebook paper, took a last sad
look at Esperanza’s side of the room, and exited through the window. It’s just
for a little while, she told herself. Esperanza would be back that night and
everything would go back to normal. She just had to wait a bit longer.
She
just wasn’t going to wait there.
TO BE CONTINUED!
