| FALL 2002 |
flashquake Fiction |
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Armandino was seven when he went to make his first confession. There was no booth, only a wooden screen bought in the neighboring Mexican bordertown. Father Wozniak sat in a gray folding chair on one side, and after the cross-eyed girl stood up in her yellow dress, wiping tears from her eyes as she began to recite the first of seven Hail Marys, Armandino took her seat. "Bless me, Father," Armandino said. "This is my first confession." "Tell me your sins," Father Wozniak said. "And speak up so I can hear you." "I pissed in the dogwater." Father Wozniak uncrossed his legs. "You what?" "My abuelita keeps dogs and I pissed in the water that they drink." "Why did you do that?" 
"Well, to see if they would drink it." "What else?" "I stole candy from the store." "What kind of candy?" "Pixi-Stix." "What else?" "I damned my mother to hell." "Why did you do that?" "Because she tricked my father, the hawk, and made him fly away." "Say that again." "Because she made my father fly away and now he won't come back." "Did you say, 'my father, the hawk?'" "Yes." "Was that his nickname?" "No. He's a hawk." "Armandino, don't you know it's a grave sin to lie to a priest, especially in confession?" "I'm not lying. He flew away before I was born, back into the sky. I damned my mother to hell the first chance I got." Are you sorry for damning her?" "No." "Armandino, I can't absolve you if you are not repentant. Do you know what that means?" "That I'm not sorry." "You can't have your first communion if I don't absolve you, do you understand that?" "Yes." "Don't you want to receive the body and blood of Christ?" "I had a tortilla with butter this morning." In the summer, when school was out, the children would stand on the small bridge and piss over the rail down to the parched arroyo below. Mostly it was boys who would watch their water arc majestically into the void, coming to rest in a graceful S on the dry earth, but girls sometimes did it, too. It was a hot July afternoon when Armandino was 12 that he saw Francisco do the ritual-Francisco, who was 10, Francisco, who had a thick patch of pubic hair where Armandino had none. "Damn," Armandino said. "Pretty good, huh?" "You little shit. How did you get so much hair? You're just a kid." "Do you want to feel it?" Armandino felt the soft curls. "It's like Jumper," Armandino said. "Like what?" "One of abuelita's dogs." Francisco laughed. "Onions." "The hell. I eat lots of onions. Raw and cooked. And look." Armandino proffered his own bald space as proof. "Nothing." "Just wait till you're 13," Francisco said. "With some boys, that's the magic number. You'll wake up on your birthday with hair down there as good as mine." A truck was coming down the highway toward them. As it neared, the white-haired old driver lay on the horn. They turned and waved themselves at him, and Armandino let loose with a warm stream of clear piss. "Degenerates!" the old man howled, but didn't stop. Francisco and Armandino pulled up their pants. "Let's go get some Pixi-Stix." The week of his birthday, Armandino woke up every morning and checked. Nothing. He closed his eyes and felt for follicles like a blind boy reading Braille, but it was useless. So he dressed and damned his mother to hell for making his father, the hawk, fly away. He remembered when she'd told him about his father for the first time. The smell on her breath, he later came to recognize, was Seagram's V.O. "He flapped his great wings and flew," she had told him. "He didn't stay to make no nest." It had been entirely her fault, he'd decided. She hadn't deserved him, or she'd made him mad, and so he had flown away. To the west and south, across the river, into Mexico. Maybe the hawks that flew by overhead were his uncles, cousins. But none of them were his father. He was sure his father had not, would not return, not as long as she was still there. And there had been many men since his father, all of them real men, not hawks, all of them fallible and low and mean. The latest one, Tony, had a nice Ford truck and wide-brimmed Stetson, but he wasn't a hawk and his Wranglers were a size or two too small. It wouldn't be long, Armandino surmised, before his mother (damn her to hell) would drink away that Ford, that Stetson, even his pants. His mother was a black pit. Thursday was his birthday. Armandino woke in the twilight of dawn as the rooster in the yard crowed and somewhere down the road, Jumper barked. He lay in bed a long time, completely still. Then, as the light in the room got better, he pulled his underwear down and looked. His heart caught in his chest. It was brown-black and shiny and long. He touched it; it was smooth. He tugged at it; it held firm. He explored the space around the feather and was thrilled to find several more small, soft, downy tufts, and when he looked at them to be sure, he saw they were brown-gray. He opened his mouth to speak and a sharp cry came out, surprising him. Then another cry, a deeper one, came from without, somewhere outside the house. Armandino ran outside naked in the dawn, chasing the sound of wings in the sky above him. And as he ran, he felt the feathers sprouting all over his body, felt himself being lifted up into the yellow sky, higher, over the bridge, the river, to the west and south. The story has been published in a school-sponsored literary magazine, THE WRITERS' BLOCK, South Texas Community College, McAllen, TX.
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