Break: Part 1

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!