Landmine!

Fiction by Brian Alarcon. "I am doing well, despite what is said. Exile doesn’t exist; for me it’s enough to walk around the property in circles, heaving."

Everything is mine in the sense that nothing belongs to me.

I am doing well, despite what is said. Exile doesn’t exist; for me it’s enough to walk around the property in circles, heaving. The good air infecting my lungs. Why shouldn’t I curse and bicker? We have no animals to feed and it makes the pasture grow taller. I wake up to the clouds drying up the soil, to the same dense gray, and the deck looks out into the center of town as if I’m the jailer. I’m not—the Misak have lived in this town for millennia. Yet, in the distance, I see groups puncturing it apart into sections. Men over men, their fake military garbs, their dollars, their laughter coming out of the town center to reach me on Hawk Mountain like smoke.

My mother makes lunch in the kitchen with her live-in maid. The maid lives in a diminutive version of the big house with her husband and two sons. Identical red-tiled roof. One room. An outhouse. Ulluco stew, which is nasty to me.

Depending on how much my good friend Muñeca makes today, we plan on drifting. It’s not easy to leave town without one of those paramilitary monkeys, but I did it; I told her, “You don’t die just because you get off the road.” She’s trilingual, like the maid’s husband. I want her to vouch for me in the jungle with her third language. Which is actually her first. Which she doesn’t use for friendship or for work. She thinks we’re going to drink and camp in a dried-up mine. That there’s a man with teeth so sharp he wants us both. That no other creature, guerilla, or foreigner will find us, dancing decrepit in soot. That they will tell their kids about the new myth of us: the hooker and the addict that this world turned into debris. Exile doesn’t exist. I’m going to ask her to sing.