While brushing my teeth, I look at myself in the mirror.
Trespassers have laid dark stains on my skin.
Dirt.
I wish, a cotton ball soaked in liquid Neutrogena my secret weapon. Instructions:
Rinse your face.
Pat it dry.
I squint—Lasik didn’t last forever after all. Twelve years in my case.
Crows have stamped long tracks, short tracks, thin tracks
around my eyes, the face of my long-gone abuela cracked
by a life devoted to tilling the earth and reaping what she sowed under the Spanish sun.
I shiver.
Three short, frizzy, grizzled hairs cluster at the temple.
I pull them.
Stubborn weeds, I can’t cut them from their root.
They will grow again.
In bed without the light, I place Mollitas around my arms. Mollitas, my forty-five-year-old pillow
that lulled me to sleep after childhood nightmares of El Barbas unrolling his long beard and rolling it back with me inside crying out for help;
that kept me rooted when I moved from private to public schools, from south to north of Spain, from Spain to the U.S.;
that sucked in my terrified tears during the long nights my mom lay in a hospital bed fighting breast cancer;
Mollitas, small, clumpy, stained, old but loved.
2. Mollitas
The fleshy part of anything—
in the body, in bread, in fruit, in a pillow . . .
It is, indeed, “molla,” like in “molla de pan” (bread crumb).
“-itas: Spanish ending with an affectionate connotation.
3. El Barbas
I made up this imaginary person, The Beard Man, when I was
four. He used his beard, as long as a runway, to kidnap kids
and then eat them alive.