Author: Luisa A. Igloria

We were joking about shadow bodies, doppelgängers, 
our bodies that don't quite feel awake until they 
have washed their faces and drank at least a cup 
of strong dark coffee. My doppelgänger ordered 
a coffee that the student barista made behind 
the counter, but with nondairy milk because of 
lactose intolerance and because though I love 
coffee, too much sometimes trips up the acidity 
in my stomach. Yet I drink it all day long, I 
nurse my one cup of coffee and make it last, or 
my shadow self will make myself another cup at home 
later in the evening because oh god she just loves 
the smell of coffee. I've been thinking of the body 
as a kind of garden, luxuriant with texture and
scent, dotted with underground caves where fireflies
sequin the water. Not that garden in the first story  
of exile where a snake in the grass wasn't there 
to play but brought a non-multiple choice test and 
a loaded answer key. My body doesn't feel like its 
core is merely a leftover rib or an afterthought. 
So many mornings my body might feel like a mess 
of limbs and thinning hair, callused heels, creaking
knees. But I would rather be a constellation of lights
winking at the edge of the ceiling, festive beyond
the holidays— wouldn't you? In the Bolivian restaurant 
where the tamales are warm and the sauce is creamy 
with a hint of heat, my body sinks into the orange 
bucket seat and feels short as a child, but it knows 
it couldn't wait to get out of the office. Someone makes 
a joke or a pun. Can't even remember how exactly it went 
now— divot, diva, treble, trouble?— but enough to produce 
a grand cackle. Funny how little plates of food and a little 
drink of something nice with friends is so restorative, even 
in this little city by the coast where sometimes it snows 
but mostly it floods and likely you'd have to travel 
somewhere to ski down the bright, powdered sides 
of mountains and breathe in the cold, lacerating 
air that says Do you feel that, do your lungs and 
the rest of you remember when last you felt so alive?

No, that isn't a piece of frilly green
      lettuce in the aquarium but a slug
which stores chloroplasts from the algae
      it feeds on. Its cells continue to photo-
synthesize light energy, so it's no longer 
      just the dull color of putty but suddenly
the most fabulous creature in the room. 
      I was never that kind of head-turner, 
only the girl sitting in the back 
      of the room, the one with the sensible 
shoes and the sensible clothes made by 
      her mother, never bought off the rack 
from some department store. One year
      in high school, the trend was apple
clogs and Faded Glory jeans— the ones
      with the tiny buckle below the rear 
waistband. I tried to take notes on color
      combinations, accessories, the difference 
between trying too hard and effortless. I guess
      some of us are just late bloomers. There are 
reports of rainbow slugs showing up in rock pools 
      across Britain, little clumps of gummy confetti
bright against rock: audacious carnival of wild 
      color, though their presence means waters 
are warming up even more from climate change.

Explain to me how some people have old
money— old meaning venerable and established, 
and despite all known hindrances, multiplying 
in the dark. Interest compounds thickly through 
decades, not musty nor feeble or infirm. 
When they call to it, it always comes 
obediently, never protesting or throwing 
them off when they ride it like a magnificent 
stallion all over their green acreage.

Meanwhile, I walk through life rounding up 
restless chickens, nervous that every rustle 
in the hedge means a fox, snout twitching 
at the thought of eggs heaped like zeroes 
in the henhouse, ready to be carried away 
and reduced to nothing and more nothing. 
My kind have always been praised for our 
industry. From sunup to sundown, bent over 
in the fields— planting rice, gathering 

strawberries and garlic, lettuce and 
asparagus; pineapples, sugarcane. The kind of
bounty heaped on crystal platters and pristine 
tablecloths in Rockwell's Freedom from Want. 
When the overseer rang the bell, my people 
lined up for paychecks made more meagre 
by illegal deductions. And yet they passed 
the hat to send a son to college, mail 
uplift to families in their village. 

How can I not respond when one of my children 
calls to ask for help with rent, an insurance 
payment, gas? Some friends say I'm an enabler, 
by which they mean I'm feeding a crippling 
dependency. Or they'll say, Do what you 
want; it's only money— suggesting the more 
important thing is to take care of what 
needs taking care of. But for those who've 
always had enough, it only means the loss 

of any money should not cause undue 
agony. My elders spoke of certain types 
of debts written on water: a ledger 
with lines and entries never legible, 
except perhaps in the heart's memory. 
Perhaps these calculate a different currency: 
one that envisions how things might someday 
return to hands resting in empty pockets, 
that hopes for a different kind of saving.  

Even now, in my sixties, I keep falling
in love with things. The crumpled
texture and weave of linen, the sharp
clean edge of a cotton collar, the soft
slouchy hems of bright socks. A lingering 
lanolin smell in the folds of a wool 
sweater makes me think of the sheep 
that was in the news not too long ago. 
There was ample grassland where she
was stranded at the foot of the Scottish 
highlands. But with steep walls of rock 
on one side and open water on the other, 
she grew lonely for the company of others. 
It took two long years until four farmers 
used a winch to rappel down eight hundred 
feet to rescue her. If Fiona— for that 
was the name they gave her— could signal
her desire across the lonely shore 
of Cromarty Firth, I too understand 
the inner stirrings reminding me I'm 
still here, inhabiting a body that quickens 
to spring. Aren't you eager for the promise 
of light the clean color of washed quartz, 
for any small warm flame of delight you can 
still cup in your hands? The humming 
in the blood says yes, why not. Yes, yes.

I stock the freezer with food—
trays of chicken, a bag of peas 
and one of corn. Blocks of butter. 
Plastic boxes with meals I've made 
ahead of teaching nights or trips 
out of town. Adobo, picadillo, 
afritada: dishes that freeze well. 
I remember reading a poem in which 
the speaker described opening the last 
container of food her mother had made 
before she died; then she and her father
sat down at the kitchen table and ate
through their tears until they couldn't 
anymore. And so, while I can also see 
that part of the reel, I know life will 
continue wanting to be fed— wanting 
the onions peeled, the fruit cored, 
the kettle filled and put on the stove 
to boil. Wanting even the small, ordinary 
work of stirring sugar into coffee then 
tapping the teaspoon on the rim of the cup. 

If they would rather slit 
their husband's throats in bed 
than remain in forced, incestuous 
marriages, I imagine the forty-
nine daughters of Danaus must not 
have minded as much their punishment
in the afterlife: endlessly drawing 
water from the river to fill a vessel 
without a bottom. I'd prefer it 
to running a race then getting 
handed off as prize to a man 
I've never seen before. What about 
other characters cursed with impossible 
tasks? The girl commanded to separate 
and count each seed before sundown, 
the child who must sweep up all 
the sand in the desert. Then there's 
Sisyphus, who gets to push a boulder 
up a slope only for it to roll back down 
again. How many times did he say You've got
to be kidding or This is nuts? But he carried 
on, didn't he? What started out as grief or
punishment must have become commitment, 
patience. Maybe even pride. A way to shift
the burden of carrying from Impossible
to No matter what, I know what I can do.

I try deciphering the sky's patterns:
what blue means against grey, how much

white gathers over rust-colored hills 
at which time of day, before night

plunges everything into uniform 
darkness. Homebound during power 

outages as storms lashed at windows, 
to pass the hours sometimes we'd spin

cerveza bottles on the table when we 
played cards, told fortunes, or asked 

questions answerable by yes or no.  
Who its amber neck pointed to 

as it came to rest was the lucky or 
unlucky one. But the future is never 

a transparent sheet— more like a plain 
brown manila envelope with a seal 

that someone shoves under the door 
with a warning not to open it until 

it's time. But when is the right time, 
and what will you find should you open

the flap and bring its contents nearer 
the blue flame to read what it says?
   

Today it's Thursday. Wasn't it just 
Monday? Everything's moving too fast.

Every day seems to bring some new
betrayal of what we want to keep.

Buses and trains leave the station,
but at least they return. The neighbor's

dog barks when the postman brings the mail, 
yet I haven't heard from you. It's been

nearly five years. Still, I collect 
flickers of things— the shadow of leaves

on the trellis. Small, hard buds 
emerging from nodes on the fig tree, 

though the rest of it is still 
shrouded in winter sleep. Evening 

is a well into which the dark pours, 
so we can pull it up just one small pail 

at a time. But time, time is the windlass 
to which all things— and we— are lashed.

My ancestors knew how to listen
for sound before it even became
sound— for the tremor in the forest

canopy before seeds helicoptered
to the ground, for the rip in the air
through which a faraway storm first

tested its breath. It's a listening
that begins in the gut, that room
in the body where they knew

interrogations take place under 
a naked light bulb swinging 
from a scaffold of bone. 

They learned to trust the call
of shrikes in the field, slugs
shriveling into themselves 

at the first whiff of toxins in
the air. When I pause mid-breath
without even knowing why, it must be

their presence alerting me to the smell 
of smoke, from having lived through past 
fires. Obeying intuition, the body inks 

a more visible map through minefields, 
as if to signal that danger itself should 
step aside from knowing we've seen it. 

When they bought a record player console
with sliding cabinet doors, my parents
treated it like their most prized 
possession— something to throw
a flannel cover on when not in use, 
in case the chill mountain air might warp 
its wooden panels. The Impossible Dream
from The Man of La Mancha was my father's 
favorite recording. He had the Jack Jones
and Johnny Mathis, and later the Frank 
Sinatra version from the album That's Life. 
He liked to sit in an armchair after dinner, 
eyes closed as he listened to the singer's 
voice pull up and up toward the unreachable, 
as the music swelled like a wave on a dark
night pinpricked with stars inside
his chest. He told me Cervantes' story 
of a man who charged at windmills, believing 
they were giants; of how he vowed to fight
for the helpless and infirm. This 
was a noble quest, he stressed— to 
bear the unbearable sorrow and right
the unrightable wrong. I couldn't fathom
then what sorrows he could have been carrying, 
what wrongs he might have needed to address.
He's been gone more than thirty years, 
yet when the world feels tilted, I remember
how sure his voice sounded, as if 
the dream— any dream— was within reach.