Mixed-media illustrator Niky Roehreke
Dropped Brown Egg
Celeste Doaks
“Everything becomes public in a small town”
— from Funes the Memorious by Jorge Louis Borges
Without the tiny scar on my right arm to remind me,
nothing would reel me back to that humid June day
when the air stood and did not move. Momma was busy
scrambling daddy’s royal breakfast and Old Spice snuck out
the bathroom door where daddy put the blade to face. That day I was
assigned to mind baby brother; and I arm-cradled him
on the front porch, bouncing him knee to knee, dreaming
of a taffy-colored baby girl. She would be my carmel icing,
my symphony of sugar. But when I awoke he lay
on concrete cracked and oozing, a brown egg frying,
sizzling so loud that momma flew from the kitchen,
and daddy’s shaving cream plopped to the ground,
a fallen white cloud, as he switched my one guilty limb.
Those Who Don’t
from The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake.
But we aren’t afraid. We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby’s brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw brim, that’s Rosa’s Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he’s Fat Boy, though he’s not fat anymore nor a boy.
All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. Yeah. That is how it goes and goes.
