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Flecha Caída

Jessica Adams

    The bus, adorned with swaying, shimmering fringe and the word of God, pulls to a stop in the old part of town. The air smells like frying tongue.
    There’s a man selling green coconuts sitting under a torn umbrella. His machete rests on the sagging plywood table next to a huge glass jar full of coconut water, viscous like plasma and flecked with jelly.
    I get off the bus, reaching into the pocket of my skirt for a few pesos. The man’s eyes, gray with cataracts, are thick and staring like a fish’s eyes.
    “Un coco, por favor.”
    He reaches into the tumble of smooth green ovals, weighs one in his hand, caressing the edge of its rough floret. Sets it on a scored coconut stump, his fingers balanced as lightly as if he were touching a slender young neck. Then he raises the machete and brings it down. Slicing and turning, slicing and turning.
    He holds it out to me with a straw between his fingers and I pierce the translucent white membrane while he wipes the edge of the machete clean with a rag.
    Across the road, the bus station. All the windows are open and fans are spinning, casting heat down upon the waiting people. The room is full of waiting. It’s the kind of waiting that seems like it could go on forever—as if the people will be surprised when at last it is time. As if they’d been awaiting their savior, and are surprised when it is only the bus that has come.
    It does come—a bus going north. I’m working my way toward the border again. Toward something. Away from something.
    I have a book on my lap, unopened. A woman with an Aztec face, gold earrings swinging as she looks for a seat—clowns, doing their hackneyed routine for spare change, then getting off at the next dusty town, and disappearing into the slim shadows between the buildings. A man selling herbal remedies he carries in a briefcase, sweating in his suit jacket and cracked leather shoes. Babies’ eyes blink open and they reach for their mothers’ breasts. The tireless hum of the engine.
    When we stop in El Paso I get on a Greyhound going west, past the luminous ribbon of the Rio Grande.
    I fall asleep for awhile, wake up to the landscape of saguaros, the right shape for someone to be crucified on, thorns drawing little rivers of blood—freight trains speeding across the flat land.
    A cloud of smoke obscures it—like from a far-off wildfire, somewhere in the Rockies north of here. I don’t stop to think how unlikely it is that the smoke could travel this far, this thick. After awhile I can’t see anything but gray, suffocating clouds.
    I’d always been afraid of fire—little flickering edges that could spark spontaneously and then creep, faster and faster. Sometimes I thought I could see little ridges of flame along the baseboards in my room. At night I surrounded myself with protective talismans. But then real bad things started happening. Things you didn’t get over. The kind of things your future self grew around like a tree that had settled on a power line.
    I look around the bus. No one else seems to notice the smoke. The driver keeps driving, straight into it.
    On the side of the road, there’s a woman with long blond hair streaming out around her head. She lies at an angle, like she was hit by a car. Like her neck was broken. Her eyes are still open—they’re swollen out of her head. Her face is purple with blood.
    I half stand up in my seat. To tell the driver to stop. To tell someone to call an ambulance.
    “Easy,” I hear a voice say. Someone’s hand is on my arm. I try to pull it off. To tell them about the woman. I open my mouth but I can’t make the words come out. I’m strangling on the words.
    “She’s having some kind of a seizure. Is there a doctor on the bus?” There’s a sound like a choking laugh. Then I realize it’s me laughing. As if a doctor would be riding this bus. Wedged in here for hours, barely sleeping.
    I open my eyes. The woman next to me is looking at me with something like horror on her face.
    “I’m alright,” I say. “I’ll be alright.”

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