Bubbles_glow

≡ A Bottle of Beer ≡

 
Corner_fold
  • Yolanda
  • Jose
  • Life and Wonder
Bottle_of_beer_sunset_catalog
A Bottle of Beer
 
Flowchart_grey_24

Dozing Mendoza

She rocked in lazy arcs and nodded to sleep, victim to the heat and the steady chickering of the cicadas that sang evening songs to lonely old women.

Yolanda only felt loneliness in the dusk of the day,  It was the meeting time of a man and his woman.  It forgave all wrongs of the night that lay still cold and heavy as an anvil at dawn.  In the morning there were things to be done that hid the seeds of resentment under plates, inside cups.

It had always been this hour that had found her vulnerable. 


 
A little girl lived with her mother, father, two sisters and five older brothers in a single room shared with a grandmother and crippled grandfather and a mentally deficient aunt.  In the warm nights the boys slept out under the black sky.

People might fight amongst themselves in such close quarters. Squabbles could split them into sides based on promises sworn in spit or in blood.  But they each knew, from the nearly blind and deaf abuela to the sweet-faced Yolanda, that the space was too small to divide.