I say, you didn’t buy that here. We don’t sell that here.

Yes, you do, he says, I see it right behind you on that shelf. I have the receipt, he says.

You didn’t buy that here, I repeat.

And I know I’ll be fired and I know that neither Mario nor I will have a job and I know that he will never love me like I need him to love me, which is to say a love that erases everything that came before, and I know that he will end me but I feel like a truck, I feel like a bag bursting with rocks, I feel like I could crush everything beneath my weight.

You didn’t buy that here, I say. I will not accept this, I say.

12

MORE THAN WE THINK

Ana

Mexico, 2019

She was only thirteen, but Ana was not afraid of death. She’d already seen it up close—how death had devoured her mother bit by bit, from the inside out, until what remained became apparent: a husk, a whisper, something you could mourn alive, not her mother at all. So she faced the river brave. She watched its muddy current swallow vines and leaves. She felt its power beneath her feet, how the placid shore hid a deeper hunger ahead.

The pollero handed her a black garbage bag in which to place her few possessions—a tattered backpack that contained a ziplock with all her important documents and a cell phone with an American SIM card she’d purchased from a gas station. She stripped to her underwear beside the dozen others who did the same—a few children and teens like her, mostly, and four adult women, two men. She stuffed her clothes, a yellowed Hello Kitty shirt and dirt-streaked jeans, into the bag. She tied a double knot.

A little girl beside her began to whimper.

Her older brother, a teenager, placed a hand over her mouth. “Shut up before he hears you,” he whispered as the girl placed a hand over his. She stopped crying.

The pollero had guided them to a large black van by the shore hidden in the scrub. Now he opened the back doors to several tires secured with rope. He held a flashlight in his teeth as he motioned to the group. He wanted them to drag a tire each, to help the little kids. He’d gone over it earlier.

Ana rubbed her legs together for warmth. All around her, thick brush scratched her ankles and mud coated her shoes. She trudged behind the others and pulled at a tire that bounced once on the ground and fell on its side. She struggled to lift the tire from the sludge and roll it toward the river. Some of the smallest kids shared a float with a sibling or adult, pushing alongside them, too little to really help. The adults instructed them, watched over them.