No tropical nights with flowers like fists, with red like Technicolor, silk like gold. No convenient killings, no husbands that go thankfully missing when they get borracho and spend their wives’ dowries. How foolish she had been, to think an American soap opera could teach her anything, to think her life would change.
Americans said naïve, but that was a French term, stolen by the English speakers. America had her Spanish, too. And now her TV.
No, not true—America had only its shows, its mustaches and slick hair and caressing lies. The dusty alley street here in sad borderland Texas had her TV, the tires of passing cars taking the bits of screen into their treads and carrying them away, angels taking all her dead Children away. And tomorrow the trash men would come and take her TV, load it in the front seat of their dented, blue-smoke-blowing truck, and try and fix her TV. Tomorrow, the trash men would come.
Originally published in Orchid: A Literary Review 2 (Spring 2003).
