8: One Fell Swoop

That day, Dino and I saw a woman drop a baby. We held hands, walking behind her, a wailing toddler on her hip. The more she walked, the more he struggled, until he tumbled headfirst. She grabbed him up. Blood stained her shirt. She screamed and gagged, but he made no sound. Before long, an ambulance appeared. My heart felt like paper.
“Can you believe her?” Dino said.
“What?” I said, still seeing her crinkled face.
“She dropped her kid.”
“He fell.”
Dino looked at me like I’d tossed that baby off a bridge. Then I knew it wouldn’t be the same.

7: Brooklyn Bridge

Lila spent her first New York night drinking at a Court Street bar with three strangers: Peter, who was pitching a screenplay; JT, a cop falling off the wagon on the city’s dime; and the impossibly-named Geronimo. Long after midnight, arms linked and four sheets to the wind, they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Eventually Peter’s screenplay paid his boys’ tuition. Sober, JT made lieutenant. Geronimo married and bought a brownstone. Lila died in a convenience store holdup, buying condoms for some one-night stand. Yet for a moment, that silly postcard view of glittering Manhattan, that dirty city, filled them with hope.

6: Two Fridas

Two Fridas sat beneath a sky of jagged clouds. “Aren’t we the same woman?” asked the Frida who Diego no longer desired as her blood stained her skirt. “All but for Diego’s affection,” answered the Frida who he loved. “Then he is like a child who must leave his mother,” said the first. “He will not leave me,” said the second and closed her fingers tighter around his tiny portrait. “No,” said the first. “Because it’s only his love that makes you other than me.” Then she took her twin’s hand and squeezed the clamp that kept her blood inside her heart.

5: My Life with Animals

When I was five, our dog died because my father wouldn’t take her to the vet. “Animals aren’t people,” he told the man next door. “I won’t waste money on them unless they give you milk or meat.” A day later the man brought us a wiggly mutt. In the garage, the man and I rubbed its belly. “It’s a boy,” the man said. “How do you know?” I asked. He undid his belt and showed me the difference between boys and girls. “If you tattle,” he said. “I’ll take this dog back.” And I believed him, since people aren’t like animals.