Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

bird to kill itself. The sheet did not land over the chicken wire; it soared over the fence. For a moment, the sheet flew, and I said go. I said fly, fly, fly. Birds fly even if it kills them.

Do you have a daughter named Ana, the officer says to me in his office after I leave the playground. It is a question but he does not phrase it like a question.

Why? I say. His office has a bulletin board covered with crayon drawings made by children.

Just answer the question, he says. One of the crayon drawings is a bird. This must be a sign.

She was turned in to the authorities, the guard says. She was left behind in a house by herself after you were apprehended.

No, I say. I left her with a babysitter.

She is with the Department of Health and Human Services, the guard says. But she is an alien minor. And she is on her way here. That’s why you are here.

The bird in the drawing is outlined in green crayon. The inside of the bird outline is orange. The sky is big smears of blue crayon, fat strokes. There is no sun.

No, no, no, I say. No.

I do not want my child here, where every child has a cough and the guards run their eyes over curves, hungry. I do not want my child here but I do not want her alone thousands of miles away. I want my child safe. If safe were a place, it would look nothing like any of the options, and I want to scream but I swallow, I want to claw but I smile, because I need to seem good. Because I need to seem worthy of something, something, some solution.

Don’t worry, the man says. She’s an alien too. She’ll go with you.

What do you mean? I say.

She’ll go to Mexico with you.

I am from El Salvador, I say. I am crying now.

To El Salvador then, he says.

What will happen to us? I say.

I think about how the orange of the bird on the wall is like the orange of my smock, my pants. How the orange could be the sun. How the bird could have swallowed the orange sun. A belly of sun.

You are in deportation proceedings, the guard answers. You know this.

So when will we go? I say. To El Salvador. When will we go?

It’s a process.

But why am I here if I will go? Why am I here if I will be deported anyway?

It’s a process, he says.

Beside the playground there is an open “recreation” space for the adults. Often the women will go there when the children are in school. Or sometimes a few women will take turns watching several of the children at the playground and the others will go on their own. I sit at a table with the other Salvadoran women. Beside us, another table, Guatemalans. Beside them, a table with fewer women: half Haitians and the other half I’m not sure. I think Chinese. The sun feels good on my skin after the cold of the office. Texas heat is different from Florida heat. Florida heat licks the skin. After work, I would wait for the bus that took me to the town house where I lived with Ana. I was always drenched by the time I got on the bus. I got used to the taste of sweat, licking my lips in the sun. I got used to waiting.

You look like you’ve been crying, says a woman named Maura. She looks so young. She has three daughters but only two are here with her.

I have been crying, I say.

She doesn’t ask why. She rubs my back.

Ánimo, says another woman, Alegra, who survived a bullet to the back. She was selling vegetables at her stand when the military started shooting at protesters. Ánimo, she says. Ánimo. Be strong.

She says a woman with a baby had a court date yesterday and they got to stay. Credible fear, Alegra says. Asylum, she says. Have you gone to the CFI prep yet? The volunteer lawyers?

CFI prep? I say.

Credible fear interview.

Credible fear? I say.

You can’t say the wrong thing, Maura says. You tell the truth but it can still be the wrong thing. You can’t be nervous.

I look up at the sky and think what use are words.

Texas heat is sometimes dry, like flying just above a burning house. Breathing a heat that rises, that burns the lungs. In Texas, my body is sucked dry.

Sometimes we can see oil stacks burning in the distance from this yard. When the sun sets, the Texas fields are burning in the horizon. Nobody comes to this part of Texas, nobody but oil workers and us. We must be families made of bird. If we are families that nobody wants, we will want one another. We are families made of birds and we will save one another because no one else is coming. I hug Alegra and cry again. I cry into her shoulder.

Dinner is a square of bologna, slick, a little slimy; a square of white bread, half thawed; a square of corn kernels. Water that sometimes tastes of bleach. Milk is for the children. Unlike lunch, dinner is with the children. But I am the only one who does not have a child with me, so after I finish, I offer to hold babies for some of the mothers so they can eat. I hold the babies who are too little for baby food. The babies who are still suckling on their mothers or hungrily drinking from bottles. The electric outlets are covered when not in use and none of the tables have sharp edges. There are high chairs. This is a jail baby-proofed for babies who should not be in jail. But they will not remember, I tell myself. They will not remember, unlike Ana who is not a baby anymore or even a toddler and she will remember.

I go back to the social