by Ricardo Acevedo

On rare nights, at rare times, I would be left on my grandfather's doorstep with a brown paper bag suitcase under my arm. I'd wander round back to the patches of green grass lawn, to the old oak tree stump (ax firmly embedded), to the overgrown xylosma bushes with zinnias and little gold butterflies swarming around, to a small paint battered Victorian and to the decaying shack -- mi "Papa's" shack.

The shack leaned as if the spinning of the world had left it wind swept and weather-beaten. Duck pens tucked under the raised floor made it seem as if the shack itself had given birth to the quacks and earthy aromas that filled the air. An obstacle course of feathers, duck pellets and properly tended groupings of mi Papa's necesidads lay between the shack and the main house. This, in my memory, was the universe.

"Que paso, mi nieto? ¡Ay, Gloria! (my mother)" would explode from his railroad barreled chest while he stare-smiled past me at his primer gray Chevy side step. Jumping it to life, he filled my eyes with dreams of sunsets and cacti. Soon, mi abuelo would be weaving between the lines on the highway, filling the potholes of old desert roads smooth for our flight to the chocolate mountains. There, where the breeze could animate the brush and tumbleweeds would race jack rabbits into hiding, we entered a place where the sky would loosen our heads.

In broken but precise English, my grandfather described distant lightening storms as "the sky taking pictures."

We contorted ourselves to catch their reflections in our shuddering eyes. He talked to me about the green stubble on the face of a mother in the change of life, how heaven's light illuminated her wounds as grace and how humans paled before her divinity. Maria of earthy passions was proud of her flowering and deflowering year after year.

It would take me years to exhale.