The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert Read Online Free PDF Page A

your hand. He screams beneath tape. You hold the ear between your teeth and grab his hair. You start to slice and rip some of his hair out. Once you’re done cutting off his hair, you place the ear inside his wallet.
    “You will be trapped in a purgatory. You will sit in a cell and you will listen. You will listen to the mothers praying at night for their kids to come back. You will feel what they are going through until you deteriorate.”
    You are shaking and tired. You take the photograph of his grandchildren and tear it in half. You drag him outside. You with your knives. Him with his ear in his wallet and his body taped to the chair. Blood follows you both to the pecan tree. You knock on the trunk, take the man’s shirt collar and throw him on his side.
    “Did you know? If you put your ear to the ground, the tree will tell you the history of this neighborhood.”
    The man is crying now. You’re crying too. You grab the photo of you and Soledad and crumple it in your hand. His crying stops and he starts laughing.
    “Can you hear the joke too?”
    You could never bring yourself to lie on your side and listen. You caress through your hair and start to braid it while you wait for the roots to grab him. It’s only a matter of seconds before you’re both gone.

 
     
    MORENA

    I want to talk about my brown skin. I have to talk about it. My ability to travel through shades and spectrums is incomparable. I don’t get red like a frustrated pale walker in the middle of a Macy’s. The internet advertised a different price and things are never easy. I become deeper browns. I become enriched with the blanket of the poor. Those women who wear the coat of bronze as a status symbol of vacations could never sit with me.

 
     
    CURLS

    I obsess over the top of my head because it has never been a place of peace. My curls are geometric half-moons with a hint of coconut. They sleepwalk toward the sky while I experience dreams of a small empty house that only exists inside my mind. Follicles jump off to mimic ghosts of ancient insects. Oils entwine into the knots and strays. I wake up in a static mess of lush genetics and fallen strands on my pillow. This is the DNA I leave behind as circumstantial evidence for resisting a tame head of hair.

 

    ENOJADA

    If somebody asks me where I’m from or corners me to guess my ethnicity, I remember their faces and think about punching their throats when I’m taking a bath to relax. They bleed from their noses as part of the hex and one clump of hair falls out of their head. One patch of hair because I am merciful. I wear dangling elegant earrings when I take baths. I read books by people of color in the bath. I listen to my pulse like Amy Hempel told me to every once in a while and smile about the times I reacted con fuerza in defense of my existence.

 
     
    TAROT

    Mom read tarot for the loud ladies next to both sides of our building. She hid it from the Jehovah’s Witnesses whenever we went to the halls on occasional Sundays and she explained to me that it was just a game. I walked into the kitchen and I saw the Death card face side up on the table. I cried before I went to sleep because this surely meant my mom picked the card of her demise. I prayed to god for no ghosts and good hair, but most of all, I prayed that it would let my mother live to see me learn her crafts.

 
     
    COLORADO

    The jugs filled with tempera paint weighed more than I was used to, but I was determined. I carried the blue paint in my backpack. The yellow in my left arm. The red in my right hand. I drew pictures of him. The ladies in the neighborhood swooned and became shy when they saw his short blonde curls and blue eyes. My crayon art depicted him as a headless man with blood bursting from the neck. I got a hold of giant permanent markers from the teen boy who always waved at my sister. I walked with a purpose and I kicked on the apartment door. I let myself in. He was sleeping on the mattress in the