Eagle Pass, Texas

Fiction by ​​Angelica Esquivel

I made a shadowbox of the town where my parents met and hung it above my kitchen table. Then I sat and smoked a cigarette that made me nauseous after just one puff. Sick, like I’d inhaled the intense scent of my father’s sacramental oils, the ones he’d rub on his temples before bed while praying so softly that no one could hear him.
 
I had spent months constructing the shadowbox. It’s not like I have anything else to do after my shift at the cookie factory. The wood for the shadowbox came cheap from Sunny Farms Landfill, reclaimed from broken pallets. The sand I’d had for years, since I was a kid and filled a glass jar with Texan sand, rocks and twigs—I have a habit of holding on to items that make my breath short with nostalgia and my brain twang like the reverberating strings of my father’s guitar, even if these items are broken and useless. My mother, Ama, had the same habit and her mother, my abuela, had it, too. The shadowbox was a small scene of the landmarks and geographical features of Eagle Pass. I made the BIENVENIDOS sign out of cardstock, stamps and black ink. The cacti and palm trees were shaped and baked out of polymer clay. The Aztec Theatre was the brown side of an empty cereal box.
 
I ran the risk of the shadowbox looking like an elementary diorama project, so I made sure to precisely cut each piece of paper and cardboard with my X-Acto Knife. As I cut, I thought of how my father used to eat apples, slicing a chunk off with his pocket knife and then eating it off the knife, somehow managing not to nick himself. Finally, I painted the box and each element with acrylics and watercolor, shellacking the parts whose textural integrity wouldn’t be compromised by gloss and shine.
 
Still queasy from the tobacco—the spice of it stuck to my fingers—I sat at the kitchen table and considered how the shadowbox looked with the rest of the room around it. The tin-golden lamp that turned on with the tap of a hand rather than a lightswitch. The print of The Last Supper with iridescent metallics painted over Jesus to punctuate his holiness. The plastic table cover. The sleeve of stale saltines. The package of store-bought corn tortillas, maíz.
 
When my parents were alive, they both worked in the fields, picking produce. I remembered my mother would take the ugly, unsellable fruit home to stew with lengua. I remembered my father was usually quiet, even when his body screamed silently, aching as he reached for food to fill another’s belly. Not once did he ask aloud why God had forsaken him, nor did he mutter the question during his quiet, private prayer. Not once, even with his blistered and bloody hands: stigmata.                               

Angelica Esquivel

Angelica Esquivel is an Ohioan writer and artist who recently graduated from the University of Michigan, where she received three Hopwood Awards and the Quinn Prize for Best Creative Thesis. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Gasher Journal, Brain Mill Press, and Crab Orchard Review.