Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

balls and blond hairpins. A pair of bone-colored sheepskin slippers, as clean as the day she’d bought them. On the door hook—a white robe with a MADE IN ITALY label, and a silky nightshirt with pearl buttons. I touched the fabrics.
Calidad
. Quality.
    I don’t know how to explain what I did next. While your father was busy in the kitchen, I went over to where I’d left my backpack, and took out a bag of gummy bears I’d bought. And while he was banging pots, I went around the house and left a trail of them in places I was sure
she
would find them. One in her lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber moon.
    Why bother? Drew could take the blame. Or he could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican voodoo. I knew that, too. It didn’t matter. I got a strange satisfaction wandering about the house leaving them in places only she would look.
    And just as Drew was shouting, “Dinner!” I saw it on the desk. One of those wooden babushka dolls Drew had brought her from his trip to Russia. I know. He’d bought one just like it for me.
    I just did what I did, uncapped the doll inside a doll inside a doll, until I got to the very center, the tiniest baby inside all the others, and this I replaced with a gummy bear. And then I put thedolls back, just like I’d found them, one inside the other, inside the other. Except for the baby, which I put inside my pocket. All through dinner I kept reaching in the pocket of my jean jacket. When I touched it, it made me feel good.
    On the way home, on the bridge over the
arroyo
on Guadalupe Street, I stopped the car, switched on the emergency blinkers, got out, and dropped the wooden toy into that muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim. The Barbie doll’s toy stewing there in that muck. It gave me a feeling like nothing before and since.
    Then I drove home and slept like the dead.

    These mornings, I fix coffee for me, milk for the boy. I think of that woman, and I can’t see a trace of my lover in this boy, as if she conceived him by immaculate conception.
    I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass. I put him in my mouth. Here, little piece of my
corazón
. Boy with hard thighs and just a bit of down and a small hard downy ass like his father’s, and that back like a valentine. Come here,
mi cariñito
. Come to
mamita
. Here’s a bit of toast.
    I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to
mamita
. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth.

    What is it inside me that makes me so crazy at 2 A.M. ? I can’t blame it on alcohol in my blood when there isn’t any. It’s something worse. Something that poisons the blood and tips me when thenight swells and I feel as if the whole sky were leaning against my brain.
    And if I killed someone on a night like this? And if it was
me
I killed instead, I’d be guilty of getting in the line of crossfire, innocent bystander, isn’t it a shame. I’d be walking with my head full of images and my back to the guilty. Suicide? I couldn’t say. I didn’t see it.
    Except it’s not me who I want to kill. When the gravity of the planets is just right, it all tilts and upsets the visible balance. And that’s when it wants to out from my eyes. That’s when I get on the telephone, dangerous as a terrorist. There’s nothing to do but let it come.
    So. What do you think? Are you convinced now I’m as crazy as a tulip or a taxi? As vagrant as a cloud?
    Sometimes the sky is so big and I feel so little at night. That’s the