"Other Alive Creatures," by Fresh Voices Finalist Cecilia Caballero
On the map, it’s called the Delta. As a child, I often ran my palms down the slippery moss of the great boulders by the shore. There is no sand there, no beach, only the waters lapping at these boulders that were bigger than me. To walk onto the pier, I had to cross train tracks, passing a single flimsy railroad crossing sign which was fitted with two small red lights. I had to run when I heard the warning bells ring. I could only run to the pier or parking lot. I always picked the pier.
My father would bring a cooler filled with cubed ice from 7-Eleven, thin fishing poles, loops of shiny fishing line, and little wiggling worms and other alive creatures inside clear plastic bags tied with a twist. He would always bring a portable battery-powered radio for playing his favorite music, sad songs by Mexican men like Vicente Fernandez and Antonio Aguilar. A sadness my father never spoke but sang between Marlboro Red cigarette puffs and sips of Budweiser beer that became lukewarm as the sun rose across the sky. He often drank too much but never on fishing days. On fishing days, he concentrated on pulling his snapback low over his eyes as he searched the waves to see something else that was alive.
From the creaking wooden pier, between the waves and the music, I watched as my father would throw the bait up and out, into sky and sunlight. My parents raised me here, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers unite. Here, where the Pacific Ocean pours itself inland to the San Francisco Bay. Where the water meets itself home again. This is the Delta, where you can look and look but find no visible demarcation line between the salt waters and the fresh waters. This means that the fish taught me how to move between elements with ease, that home is an always moving thing.
My hometown calls itself the Gateway to the Delta and this is where I am from. After packing the fish on ice, we would take the cooler home. If we were lucky, it was a combination of striped bass, steelhead, and sturgeon. I’d watch as my mother would slice open fish bellies over the sink. Dark red blood seeped down the drain as she scooped quivering entrails with her fingertips. Sometimes my mother fried the fish in vegetable oil on the stovetop and other times my father would cook them on the black grill that was shaped like a three-pronged UFO with wheels. We always ate the fish with tortillas de maiz, crema, y limon con sal. The Delta sustained me and this is how I learned to survive.
I left the Delta ten years ago. I am now grown with a child of my own. I have been raising my son in Los Angeles for ten years. There is too much concrete here. Even the wildness of the river is contained by concrete. There is no Delta near me, but there is a lake at Hollenbeck Park down the block. I often walk there and lie on the grass that I share with flocks of ducks and geese even though the soil is laced with lead that was leaked from the old battery plant nearby. At night, in bed, I stare at the glow of my cell phone and read more bad news about pandemics and politics. All the articles somehow look the same. And yet I still can’t stop searching for the many ways that doom will find us.
As I write this, the Bobcat fire in LA County is still burning in the mountains. The news articles say that the fire has been contained but the air is still bad. The smoke carries infectious microbes that are displaced from the soil and dispersed into the winds where they are carried across county lines and continents. They can bloom themselves into new homes deep within our lungs and sicken us. I just need to breathe. But ash is still falling from the sky and the sun is still a strange neon glow so I stay inside all day again and run the portable air filter. This singular air filter seems absurd, almost ridiculous, against the magnitude of the wildfires along the entire West coast, but I push the power button on anyway. I imagine that the air rids itself of particulate matter, pollution, and paranoia while my son types his first essay for school on the couch, does long division on large sheets of filler paper, eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, takes standardized tests on material he has not been taught, is told to be compliant and prove his proficiency when the world is on fire. Not long ago and not too far from our home, my son watched as the National Guard was stationed with military vehicles and weapons on sidewalks in Downtown LA. My son is learning about a sort of survival, too.
I stay up too late listening to a podcast about climate change and learn new terms like blue lining and desalination plants. I listen some more and I am reminded of old words like panic and fear. I search online for “climate change in the bay area” and find an article with an interactive map of the Delta. You can sit on your couch in the comfort of your living room and click through to see the severity of catastrophe, see all the algorithms and the data, how number one signifies the best case scenario and number ten is the worst. I click on ten. I try to tell myself that the future will not only exist in a computer simulation when I see that the digital map is suddenly nearly all blue. My hometown is projected to be underwater. The Pacific will flood the Delta, but it won’t stop there. The flooding will seep all the way up north to Sacramento. Ocean creatures of all kinds and sea salt waves will reclaim the land as these cities named after settlers are drowned off the map, one after the other.
My mother has lived in California for forty years. She arrived here with my father, newly married, sin papeles or money. They lived in a car at first, then an apartment with no running water where she bathed my older sister in a plastic tub. My mother will likely never see her hometown in Michoacán again. She could find a way if she really wanted but she insists that she is too busy. She says that she needs to work. These days, she returns from her job where she cleans a fast food restaurant with industrial strength chemicals, hands customers their food in greasy paper bags through the drive-thru window, breathes other peoples’ droplets and toxic fumes all day through a cloth mask. After work, she returns to the one-bedroom apartment that she shares with my two brothers and sometimes my father. My mother, whose aching back and sore muscles require more strength than her flimsy mattress can offer, often lies on the carpeted floor in front of the bathroom, snoring softly, one hand over her face as if she has closed her eyes with a swipe of her palm. Behind her, a trail of dark mold climbs up and up near the bathroom door, like an arm reaching upward. But reaching up towards what? To where?
In the winter of 2019, the last holiday season before a virus ruled the world, my son and I visited my family for Christmas. My mother welcomed us with dollar store offerings: green plastic elves, off-brand tins of holiday cookies and chocolates, and too-thin Christmas stockings with candy cane designs. The next day, we drove to the Delta and me and my son walked along the same pier where my father used to fish, with the same wooden planks and warning bells, where the $100 million dollar desalination plant will soon come to somehow rid the Delta of its rising seawater. Here, with the same air and boulders and moss, where you can see the fresh waters of the river when you turn right and see the salt water of the ocean when you turn left. My son suddenly laughed at a seagull and I remembered that we are such alive creatures too.
To prepare for our visit, my mother bought a small Douglas Fir tree from the Rite Aid parking lot. At home, she added gold tinsel and strings of blinking lights just for us. A single Christmas postcard was placed between branches, from my father’s long-time dental office. The postcard is not signed but imprinted with a rubber stamp with the office’s address, hours of operations, and telephone number. Even the dentist’s signature is stamped. But every year, the dentist’s holiday card is always placed in the tree. It is now the only holiday card that my family receives. I can’t remember precisely when the other holiday cards stopped coming. Even my padrino Jesus, my mother’s brother, who never left their pueblo, stopped sending cards because my mother never wrote back. How could she explain the police reports, the holes punched through walls, the time she went to court and the judge believed my father’s story that my mother was crazy and dangerous, and how, weeks later, she’d laugh with him on the phone. There are no other cards in the Christmas tree because it is better not to say that we are made of madness.
When me and my son first arrived for our visit, there was nothing under the tree. The lack of any presents underneath a Christmas tree seems jarring, odd, incompatible with the excesses of America. But slowly, my mother gathered her holiday treasures from the dollar store, Wal-Mart, and Dee Dee’s Discounts. She wrapped the presents in paper with images of a whimsical Santa Claus even though we always go shopping together and already know what’s inside. I remember doing this as a child, too. I learned to pretend from my mother, a useful skill then and now in any number of situations. I pretended not to notice that my father spent less and less time at the apartment, a question that was easier not to ask.
And it was not my father but my mother who boiled whole chickens in large cooking pots and left it on the stovetop for my brothers to eat before she went to work. It was not my father but my mother who, after her shifts, brought oversized plastic bags of beans and rice that never taste quite right but the food was eaten anyway. My brothers, both of them, slept for most of the day. One has a diagnosis from the county hospital’s mental health ward and the other does not but there isn’t enough help either way. And it was not my father but my mother who cared for my brothers the best way she knew how with her chicken and rice and beans and discounted presents under the tree.
On her day off, when my mother wasn’t cooking or sleeping, she painted each of her fingernails a different color with nail polish from miniature bottles that she bought on clearance. She fully extended her arm in front of her and splayed open her fingers to display the many delicate textures and shades: glittery shiny silver, neon pink gel, sky blue matte. She sat at the plastic folding table in the living room that was decorated with a single potted poinsettia wrapped in festive red foil. I only just learned then that poinsettia is a plant that is indigenous to the region that is now called Mexico. Poinsettia is not its real name. But somehow home found her here anyway. It is alive and beautiful even in the dark. This is my mother’s home now; the mold, the poinsettia, her nails, the sea salt air. She taught me that sometimes you must go and stay gone.
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Cecilia Caballero is an Afro-Chicana single mother, poet, essayist, speaker, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work collective and co-editor of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución (University of Arizona Press 2019). As a teaching artist, Cecilia designs and facilitates poetry workshops for BIPOC folks to cultivate more spaces of healing and social justice. She has been invited to give workshops and talks at East Los Angeles College, UC Berkeley, San Diego State University, the University of Arizona, and more. Cecilia has received fellowships from Tin House, VONA, Macondo, and the Authentic Voices program with the Women’s National Book Association. Her prose and poetry is published or forthcoming in Raising Mothers, The Acentos Review, Third Woman Press, Dryland Magazine, Star*Line Magazine, Chicana/Latina Studies, Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology, and elsewhere. Cecilia is currently completing her first full-length book of creative nonfiction. Follow her on Twitter @la_sangre_llama.
