How to use this Page

The skull smells like cleaning fluid, the pine oil kind that Mama uses on the kitchen floor. It weighs a little more than the soccer ball Uncle Rego gave me last year for my eleventh birthday. The yellow-white color almost matches the ivory of the old piano in the shed, the one Papa promises to fix up for Mama one day. One day when he works a single job instead of three.

Uncle Rego says the skull belongs to our great-grandmother. He says he brought it back from Sonora on one of his trips. The rest of the bones, he says, had to wait. Too hard to get them across the border, he says. And then the broken leg. And then he stopped going back to Mexico because things were bad in Sonora.
I’ve stolen Uncle Rego’s skull three times now.

The first time I left it on the back porch, assuming it would be gone in the morning. Uncle Rego found it when he came home, stumbling more than usual with the heavy reek of cigarettes and tequila clinging to his clothing. He merely wrapped the skull in the folds of his shirt and staggered to his room in the basement, muttering in Spanish.

The second time, I tried harder. I took the skull into the yard and placed it near the small rock garden Mama loves. She’s the one who found the skull the second time, but a day or to passed before she noticed, possibly because it blended in so well with the stones.

“Mateo,” she said. “This isn’t something to play with.”

This time, I did better. I buried the skull in the soft garden dirt next to Mama’s peppers and tomatoes. I buried it deep—as deep as I could before my arms began to burn and sag like rubber bands. Not that it is hidden, exactly, just deep. Deep enough, I hope.

When Mama comes into my room, I tell from the sour frown and lines on her face she wants to know where it is. Uncle Rego cries out every few minutes from his room.

“Where is it this time, Mateo?” she asks. Her arms cross her chest.

What scares me, more than anything, is how white Mama’s face gets when I tell her about the headless woman who throws pebbles at my bedroom window most nights. I tell her the skull is hers, and she just wants it back. I tell her I don’t think the skull belonged to Great-Grandma, and ask if Rego knows who the headless woman is. Mama just cries, folds me toward her chest, and rocks back and forth, saying, “hush, hush.”

Everyone thinks they know what it’s like. Movies. TV. Animated undead violence. The video games with unlimited shotgun shells and reset buttons and blood options labeled red or green or off. Neat if not clean, the head shot works every time.

My son used to wake up in the night in cold sweats, the words, “is there anything scary” tripping from his tongue. I’d put my arms around him and rock and lie with the words, “no, of course not.”

Not anything scary, Davy. Anyone. Your mother, maybe. Me.

But I never thought about my boy dying. I never imagined that particular path, what I’d do if it happened. How I’d be. Which dangerous suggestions became oxygen; which unholy actions became water and food. What a mother does for her little boy, a little boy she remembers on a tricycle on the front drive. A little boy with denim overalls sagging at the knees. I never thought of how far I’d go, what wishes I’d wish, until I did. Until the little boy grows sick and died, and I wanted to tear the world into strips and tear the strips until the fragments melted like snowflakes on a five-year-old’s tongue. But all I had were the memories and the want. The want was a powerful thing.

There were books and wishes and trips to the cemetery. Nighttime trips during which I crawled over the stone wall and caught my pants on the rust-flaked iron spikes. A little blood never hurt. Not for my boy. There’s the book and a new knife and the chicken and the candles purchased at a shop tucked under the big river bridge, the shop without a sign or regular hours. But the love was always there. Even in the cold. Even in the dark when I mumbled syllables I didn’t fully understand and cried because I didn’t have a five-year-old to hold and lie to about scary things anymore.

I didn’t plan on the sound he made when he came home, a slow, scraping sound like a stick dragged across the driveway. I didn’t plan on the way he looked, either. Bloodless. Pale. Not the half-rotten thing of movie-myth. Worse. Too much like my little boy. Enough to bring the fear rising, warm and acidic, in my throat. The smell lacked that repulsiveness I’d come to expect from the myth-makers.

Davy, but wrong.

The head shot killed of course. It killed again, stopped the boy-thing, the mirror to which the real monster was held in the night. There was nothing neat about it. Nothing cleansing. No red or green or off toggle switch for the blood. I know what it’s like when a loved one comes back. I always knew, even at the funeral, even before I brought the book and the knife and the chicken into the cemetery. I’ve lived past that illusion.

You don’t plan these things. I know.