Puerta de Atocha
By August Reid
Words spoken to each other at the train station:
- mi vida
- dónde están las tortugas
- necesitas afeitarte
- cariño
- muchas gente aquí
- demasiada
- ellos son como hormigas
- como robots
- verde verde verde
We don’t speak about how I’ll be leaving in fifteen minutes. We don’t speak about how we are no longer we or the things that cut us so. We don’t speak about how we ended quietly like a withering leaf falling from a tree. Or maybe it was more than that. The will to hold on dying after a long autumn wind. We sit on a stone bench at the edge of the botanical garden.
Puerta de Atocha buzzes: train arrives, train departs, electric smoke, woman pulls at her wrinkled cheeks, wipes tears, child stares at clusters of palm trees, points at leaves bigger than her body, person walks, person leaves, person runs, copernicia alba, California palm, Queen palm, coconut. We once named all the turtles in the garden here. They are all gone now.
We are both sweat-sticky. The humid musk, the stale dust and pond water, will cling to our hair for days. I think about how this moment will be washed down your shower drain with soap suds and dead skin. We sit facing each other. One leg on either side of the bench, both of us hunched like monkeys. You are all walnut-shell eyes, staring unemotive, unkempt scruff crawling down your neck. I kiss your hand again and again. Feel moisture transfer from between the ridges of your knuckles to my lips. Something about endings gives me the need to mother. I want to grow something from nothing. Want to pluck dust from the apartment window sill. Want to watch you break something. Want to fix it. Want to reach for your face and squeeze the zit on your forehead. The garden here in the train station was planted as a memorial after a massacre.
You pull your hand away from me and look up at the ceiling. The tall gray arc that shells the plants. We are opposites. The breakup has made you cold and avoidant. You are steel. Every so often, however, your sadness blooms and reveals itself: you sucked your hot coffee down in two large gulps this morning, wore your best button-down shirt—the gray polyester one with black buttons—carried my suitcase down stairs for me, didn’t offer me your left ear bud on the bus ride. Our relationship is losing a sock in the dryer. Our relationship is taking a bite and noticing a spice was forgotten.
The garden holds many breadfruit trees. As you squirm and glance, look at everything that isn’t me, wait for me to speak because you are out of words, I count the breadfruit on every tree. They hang in groups—green gooseflesh skin, large fanning leaves—like balloons on the ceiling of a party store.
In the Caroline Islands, breadfruit is a metaphor for knowledge. Life is composed of five tenants: war, meetings, navigation, magic, and breadfruit. A Hawaiian myth says breadfruit was a gift for the god, Kū’s, sacrifice. His whole village starving, he left the mortal world, plunging himself deep into the ground. When his family cried from his absence, their tears watered the dirt and created breadfruit. I wonder what knowledge they received. Maybe they learned nothing. Maybe breadfruit was only the end of a famine.
When my eyes drift back down to the pond, I search once more for any of the turtles. Their slick yellowed shells. Their speckled skin and slow steps. Another train arrives and hums; a metal detector beeps. I don’t find any turtles. Instead, under the water’s surface, a collection of small silvery fish.
THE END
Author Bio: August Reid (they/them) is a writer and artist from Rio Rancho, New Mexico. They received their BA and MA in English Literature from Arizona State University and are currently an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. They love constellations, rainy days, a good queer romcom, Doc Martens, and their cats, Raspberry and Ophelia. August is at work on a novel.