"Inventory" by Julia Viejo
translated from Spanish by Jacob Rogers
A cuckoo clock inherited from my great-grandparents, an electronic shark from the science and technology fair, a snow globe featuring the Kremlin in Moscow beside a ballerina at an impossible scale, a Pinypon beach house set that the Three Kings brought me when I no longer believed in them, a Dadaist sculpture my sister called Don Boniato, a five-thousand piece puzzle we left half-finished out of exasperation one summer, an Extremoduro concert poster, a pair of ballet shoes, the dog bed for our first dog, Karl, the dog bed for our second dog, Lenin, which we never used because it smelled like cat (we never figured out why), a collection of hand-carved bamboo bolls we got from the Chinese exchange student who lived in our house for an entire school year, a toolbox with nothing but screws, the Bitter Kas bottle from my parents’ first date, a folder with photos of my graduation where my face is covered in acne, a DVD of Stripes, the cage of a parrot I got for my birthday, which escaped the next day when it was about to learn its first word, my parents’ divorce agreement, a tarot deck, an armadillo that sang a funny song when you squeezed its belly, a yearbook we bought at Camden Market with an exact clone of my father, a plug-in mosquito repellent, a box with sand from the beach that my sister thought were the ashes of our dogs, the scale that first told me I weighed twenty-five pounds more than I should, a lock I unsuccessfully tried to install on my door, a porcelain Bethlehem scene, a Rayo Vallecano soccer trading card deck that I dropped in a puddle one rainy afternoon which left me crying for a week, the little box where Pérez the Rat kept our teeth, a beaded lamp that we made for mother’s day, the same Sunday dress in two different sizes, a grapevine costume, a serial killer costume, an alien prostitute costume, the Sega Megadrive that our grandmother called the such-a heap-a-junk, an El Niño sweater that belonged to my first boyfriend Luis, twelve mini DV tapes of my sister’s concert flute recitals, a first-edition of Manolito Gafotas signed by Elvira Lindo, a chess board missing a white knight, my first high heels, my great-great-grandmother’s birth certificate, a 32GB iPod, the diary where my sister confessed that she’d gotten mixed up with her chemistry teacher, a Ravenclaw sweater, the cushion I put between my legs when I went to sleep, a textbook from Transition into Active Adult Life class, a matchstick castle, a plastic bonsai, a perfume factory, a star projector.
This is everything they found in the monster’s stomach after it swallowed up our house.
(c) Julia Viejo, 2022. This story originally appeared in Spanish in El la celda había una luciérnaga, published by Blackie Books.
Julia Viejo (Madrid, 1991) holds a degree in Translation and Interpretation, and a Master's Degree in Publishing. She has worked for various small presses and as a bookseller, as well as a translator of English, and a contributing writer to a variety of magazines and as the editor for new anthologies of modern-classic Spanish writers. Published in 2022 to great acclaim, In the Cell There Was a Firefly, a collection of short and flash-fictions, is her first book.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. His translation of Manuel Rivas' The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022, and of Berta Dávila's The Dear Ones by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023.
