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[Fiction]

Fruition
by Janice Levy
       

Excerpts:

Rudy wants us to be novios; he is tired of this friendship thing. He says it’s all right for me not to love him yet. He can live on hope.

“Inténtalo,” he says, his knees touching mine. He slides a breath mint under his tongue. If we are novios he can kiss me on the lips.

But, there is this stranger, I think, and turn my head away. A stranger with a shaved head who looks like Michael Jordan. For three days he has sat in El Soda Pintico, eating lunch in Violeta’s tiny luncheonette, always at the table that tilts to the right, the one closest to the door facing the street. The stranger opens and closes a bottle of red and yellow chilies and writes on a pad, chewing on his pen until the meal comes. He orders a casado for 500 colones. He starts with the egg, then the cabbage salad, then the rice and chicken, wiping his mouth often with thin paper napkins. He eats the plátanos with his fingers and saves the frijoles for last. He drinks two cocas sin hielo and twirls his straw in the warm soda as if looking for answers in the bottom of his glass.

From my fruit stand I see him perfectly; I sit on a low stool, my face half hidden behind the cash register . . .

. . .

. . . “Habla inglés?” he asks, raising his eyebrows above his sunglasses. His voice is lazy and slow, like ice cream melting.

“Sí, yes.”

I study English in school. I can even speak some German. I have learned from the tourists, I write letters for my mother, but I tell him none of this. Instead, I say only: “Gallina . . . Chicken. Pollo . . . hen. Lápiz . . . pencil. Pluma . . . pen.”

The stranger looks puzzled, then laughs and his teeth are white and straight, as white as sugar, straight and perfect like Chiclets in a box. He laughs as if I have told the funniest joke in the world and I want to die. I want to dissolve into the floor and die from the shooting pains in my stomach, from the thunder exploding in my ears, from the lightning ripping through my chest . . .

 

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