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September past. Later, I pulled the corpse in off the beach and
buried it with some pomegranate flowers.
My house sits slightly away from the road. It is protected from
the sun by the Cedar trees, which means that I can lie on the roof
and watch the ships. I have nothing else to do. I am usually alone.
Women don’t do much here. We don’t do, we are – merely objects
to the men. Our population is mainly comprised of the Box Men.
All of my nine brothers are Box Men – from José who is twenty, all
the way down to Miguel who is thirteen. Every day I watch as they
walk from the house to the docks and unload crates into the boots of
shiny black cars. But each
Domingo
– the Lord’s day – a finer black
car comes and picks up Padre and whisks him up to the Isthmus of
Panama, the gateway between heaven and hell.
My name is Lucia Perez and I have but fourteen years. I live in
Panama – near where the border lies. My padre, Fernando, and my
nine brothers work for infamous
capo de la droge
, drug lord, El Padre-
unloading hundreds of pesos worth of drugs from Columbia by day,
and transporting them into Mexico by night. My brother Eduardo
has been missing for two months. The last time I heard from him
was the night before he was trying to cross
la frontera
, the border, for
good. I think he’s in América now, and I plan on following him. I
want to get into Heaven too.
Today the ocean glimmers like one hundred individual suns have
been placed under the surface and, like dominos, the palms sway
down the road, one after the other, as if they are bowing down to the
passers-by. The angled buildings – made of cement blocks and of
plastic – filter through the auburn rays which form the bold shadows
on the fractured pavement. I inhale deeply. The air is thick. It rained
overnight, I think to myself – imagining the helpless droplets of
rainwater evaporating as soon as they made contact with the
sweltering wok that was the sidewalk. It is quiet. The only disruption
to the serenity is the sound of men’s shouts, travelling from the dock.
From my position on the roof, I can see through the bottle- green
foliage all the way to the distant horizon. The water must be flat out
there, I reason, as I cannot see the ships stirring as though they are
battling the white-capped, frothy waves of the Pacific Ocean. Big
cargo ships, Padre labels them, all with their sterns directed toward
the Américas.
Lucia!
La Frontera
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