A Food Court in Hell
I have a strange condition that sometimes causes me to shift from this mortal plane to the Afterlife. Just one of those things, a quirk of genetics, maybe, like tetrachromacy or that ultrarare blood type without antigens. This wasn’t the first time I’d visited Hell, nor the first time I saw my abuela there. The first time, Hell was her shotgun shack, the way it looked when I was a little girl—the avocado-green shag carpeting that had lost its pile, the furniture scavenged from curbsides and construction sites. My abuela was there, but she looked like a zombie, with gray flesh and dead eyes. The front and back door were open and stray dogs wandered in and out. Shit and piss and flies everywhere. The flies were the worst, their buzz drowning out everything. It must’ve been cold because Abuela was bundled up in blankets. We didn’t get to talk that time.
If we had, I might’ve said, Abuelita, when you were dying, I was the first to arrive at the hospital. I sat with you in the ICU, alone, waiting for the rest of the family to arrive. I can’t even remember what you looked like, lying there in the bed. I suppose you’d prefer it that way—you’d prefer that we remember you with your hair done and your lipstick on. All I remember was staring at the wrist where you’d lost your hand. Was it the right or the left? I think it must have been the left, because I remember wondering what had happened to your rings—the wedding ring from your last marriage, which had been over for twenty years, and the gold ring I brought back as a souvenir from Madridejos. When the nurse came in, she offered condolences. I said, “She was a difficult person.” The nurse said, “Yeah. That happens.” The others came. A hospital chaplain administered last rites, even though you weren’t technically baptized. When you finally slipped away, your daughter, my mother, nearly collapsed and I caught her. For days, I felt a twinge in my lower back from catching the weight of my mother’s grief, which was also the weight of your grief, and your mother’s.
In my latest Afterlife drift, we met up at a food court in Hell. Abuela didn’t look like a zombie this time, but she wasn’t wearing lipstick either. She was wearing her housecoat and slippers. Mall food courts are always on the top floor, so I wondered if this was the top floor of Hell. I don’t know if the Devil was trying to tell us there’s nowhere to go but down, or if this means she’s managed to move up, leaving Cerberus and Beelzebub behind. But even if this was the outermost circle of Hell, it was still Hell. We were surrounded by demons. Some looked like demons and some looked like people, but I knew they were all demons. Demons buying Auntie Anne’s pretzels and Jamba Juice. We browsed the vendors, Original Pizza, Cinnabon, Panda Express, searching for tacos, a seemingly endless maze of mall lighting, stanchions, nylon ropes, counters, red plastic cafeteria trays, and napkin dispensers. Remember, towards the end, how you liked going to the Furr’s Cafeteria at a dying shopping mall? A depressing place where senior citizens got quivery cubes of Jell-O and salty entrees smothered in gravy. Here in Hell, we found the taco stand and you ordered me lengua tacos. You told me to eat up because I’d need my strength. The food court reminded me, too, of long afternoons in line at the charity hospital where we’d go to get your diabetes medications refilled—bright and crowded, packed with uncomfortable chairs and general misery. We found a table and sat down to eat. I said, “I’ve carried you like a wound for the last fifteen years,” before I bit into my tongue and swallowed.
Yes, carried you. The way I carried innumerable moments: Sitting in a Psych 101 class when I was eighteen, realizing that you were a sociopath, that your father should have let you stay in that hospital. I don’t know if they could have helped you back then or not. Maybe the antipsychotics they would have fed you would have done more harm than good. A second cousin died in the state hospital, raving about the Devil, convinced that he had stalked her since childhood. Maybe the Devil was in all of us. I carried your disability checks—you claimed disability, but not for the reasons you actually needed it. I carried the screaming and the cursing. We breathed violence. We consumed it like our meals, chile de arbol salsa sitting in the stone molcajete like a bloody sacrifice. There can be no violence without violence to the self, and you threatened suicide more times than I can count. Then you tried to make yourself sick in the dumbest ways imaginable—skipping your shots, eating an entire jar of jelly to give yourself sugar shock, just so you could tell the hospital workers that your family neglected you. I carried how it was more important to be beautiful than smart, how I should use beauty as a currency, as a profession. You hated that I rebelled against lipstick. That time when I was 15 and you wanted me to kiss the 35-year-old neighbor because he’d done the family a favor. You didn’t see anything wrong with a teenager dating a grown man because that’s what you did. It was the only way you knew how to relate to men. I carried how your own mother betrayed you more than once, starting with how, when you were still a baby, she fobbed you off on your grandmother, who let you drink beer and smoke cigarettes before you were six. How you later fobbed your own daughter off on her grandmother. How every hurt you dealt was a hurt you yourself had once been dealt. What did you ever care about? Did you really care about anything?
I ate my Hell tacos and returned to this world, carrying the reminder that I am forever stuck between here and there. They say death is a transformation, but you looked the same to me. They say that to commune with your ancestors is to benefit from their wisdom. What wisdom did you ever impart? You said I’d need my strength. That’s all I’ve ever needed. They say to dream of death symbolizes a part of you that has died. It’s true, part of me died when you did. They say if you don’t use a language, you lose it, and since you died, I don’t have anyone to speak Spanish with. I’ve lost the lengua. If only I could figure out how to travel through time the way I do through dimensions, maybe I could reclaim it. We scattered your ashes in your mother’s backyard. Bisabuela, abuela, mother, daughter. (I’ve heard it said in numerology that four is a number of stability, but there’s never been anything stable about the four of us.) I know your afterbirth was buried on this hill somewhere, so you came full circle. Your old house is still standing, but it’s been renovated. You wouldn’t recognize the inside of it now. Gone is the old heater with isinglass windows, the 27” TV, that I think might have been the largest set you’d ever owned, your record collection, Pedro Infante and José Alfredo Jiménez and all those old ranchera crooners that I listen to now when I’m feeling nostalgic. Nostalgia is the pain from an old wound. You were something to endure. But there would be no here for me without you. The strength I needed was for healing. I will be the first of us to travel whole.
Lauren Scharhag (she/her) is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry, and a senior editor at Gleam. Her latest poetry collection, Moonlight and Monsters, is now available from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. She lives in Kansas City, MO. https://linktr.ee/laurenscharhag