Perla Read Online Free PDF Page A

through, a way to go back home, or at least tell those they’d left behind what happened so they wouldn’t have to worry. But the slipping-place was gone. I wrote this story for myself, in the depth of the night, spilling over beyond the demands of the assignment, which was a story of three pages while my own version continued on for thirteen, and every page surprised me, made me wonder where it came from, where the words and memory-breaths and tangled translucent avenues and ethereal lost people with distorted mouths had come from, what this force that pushed my pen across the page could be. When I finished, I didn’t dare to read it over. Instead I put it under my pillow and slept the three remaining hours of the night.
    The story won a school contest, and a briefer version was published in the newspaper. My teacher had me stand up at her desk while the whole class clapped, and though they did so with wooden duty and even envy, the sound still showered through me and reached inner chambers I had not known were there.
    When I came home that night, at ten o’clock from studying at a friend’s house, my father was waiting for me in the living room. He was drunk.
    “Come here.”
    I didn’t want to go there but I did.
    “Sit down.”
    I sat.
    He held up the clipping of my story. “What is this?”
    “A story.”
    “Who wrote it?”
    I grasped my fingers in my lap. “I did.”
    “Oh yeah? And who are you?”
    Papá looked old, gray around the edges. I thought that he might shout or hit me, but he didn’t. His tone was a slap already. He stared at the wall and then at me and with his eyes upon me I wanted to shred that story and swallow it, piece by piece, pull the whole thing back into my body and make it disappear.
    “Perla. There are a lot of things that you don’t understand.”
    I nodded.
    “We’re your parents. Your mamá and I.”
    I felt Lolo amble up to me. He leaned his cool shell against my ankle, and this calmed me a little. I nodded again.
    “Do you want to lose us?”
    I shook my head.
    “You want to be an orphan?”
    “No.”
    “Then why the hell would you write a thing like this?”
    Mamá was in the doorway now. “Héctor,” she said, “that’s enough. Stop it.” She walked over, hard shoes echoing, and put her hand on Papá’s shoulder, her long red nails against his white shirt like exotic insects. I leaned forward, into the sweet edge of her perfume.
    Papá looked at me with an open face, a face more open than I’d ever seen on him, afraid, exposed, a man lost in the jungle. At that moment, I felt as though I understood nothing, not a single thing about the world, except one: I would not write. I moved forward and put my hand on his knee to comfort him, or to calm him, or to keep myself steady.
    “Perla,” he said, “you’re killing me.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “All right then,” said Mamá. “Let’s all go to bed.”

    His eyes are closed but he isn’t sleeping. He recalls the time when he had no eyes. They hooded him, a simple way to take eyes from a man. He wore the hood day and night, and day and night did not exist, there was only dark, the dark was everywhere, all around him, in the air while he swung from the ceiling, in the cold water thrown over his sleep, in the steel mesh of the electric table. The men said You are nothing, We are God, and pissed and spat on him, his countrymen, all in a day’s work. Sometimes they said it shouting, and other times mechanically, duty done, mission accomplished; in his other life when he had eyes he might have asked them for their names, or for some shred of who they were, perhaps he’d known them, their feet may have once kicked a soccer ball his way in some park in the city, it was possible, there had been many games in the park, but this was not soccer and he was not a ball and their feet had their own marching orders.
    He missed his eyes at first. He longed for light and thought that light might save him. He wanted