Fiction
Superglue
By J Buentello Benavides
When your eldest son marries una vieja Americana who doesn’t like fun, it’s only natural that you buy her a giant cookie jar in the shape of a beagle for Christmas. At Wal-Mart three days before Christmas Eve, you roam down the nearly empty clearance aisle right next to the gardening section where you spot the cookie jar among torn toys and cracked coffee mugs. Half the beagle’s right ear rests broken on the white shelf next to an opened bottle of nail polish. You run your wrinkled thumb against the jagged edge of the broken ear. A little superglue can work miracles, you think.
At the checkout station, the cashier asks, “You sure you want it damaged like this?”
“Of course,” you say. “It’s for my daughter-in-law.”
“Does she bake a lot of cookies?”
“Nope,” you say. “Es una perra.”
The cashier smiles at you the same way you smile at the woman you hate. Stiff lips and squinted eyes because you try to make it seem a bit more real. Last year for Christmas, you gave that woman a set of cheap wax candles that you won from a Dollar General raffle they had around Easter. No matter how carefully you handled the eggs, chunks of green, gold, and pink glitter peeled off the wax. The cheap product amazed you because you knew that it would force that woman to groan and vacuum the carpet like she did every year on Easter when you visited her.
Eight months ago, she banned your granddaughter from playing with the confetti eggs you bought her. The hollowed-out eggshells broke at the slightest touch, and when you cracked an egg over your granddaughter’s head, the little fragments of paper tangled deeply in those red curls she inherited from that damned woman. At the party, she didn’t even serve cake or cookies or sodas. That woman gave out celery sticks and apple slices. She served bitter tea in mini-teacups—gold and pink like the eggshells your granddaughter no longer gets to touch.
When you get home with the beagle, you skip the wrapping paper and stick a bow with dangling strings on its collar. They coil around your wrinkled fingers. Drooping skin frames the beagle’s brown eyes just like your own sagging skin. Dark fur like your own thinning, brown hair. You lift the beagle’s broken ear off the table and run your fingers against the jagged edge. You wonder if superglue could even begin to fix a break this big.
Stargirl
By J Buentello Benavides
I don’t like streaming Stargirl or The Walking Dead or any of the shows you like with gods pretending to be people and people pretending to be gods. On our screen, a dragon queen rains fire and brimstone over cobblestone. Children fold into themselves, collapsing to ash, screams gurgling from crushed throat walls like when your hand closes over yet another empty beer can, collapsing its core till nothing remains. Amidst the crackling of fire, I turn to you and say that I don’t like this scene in Game of Thrones because I don’t understand why the beloved queen, the breaker of chains, the mother of dragons, would want the world she fought so hard for to end in embers.
And when you crane your neck forward, pointing your chin towards me, I notice the white of your eyes cracked by red veins like gummy worms spilling over melted snow. We’ve stayed up all night, again, streaming all the shows you like, and when the lover of the dragon queen slips a blade between her breasts, she crumbles in his arms, becoming weightless, blood pooling behind clenched teeth. “That’s what she deserves,” you say, staring at me. But why? “Because she’s crazy.” But why is she crazy? “Because that’s what happens to women with too much power.” You chug the rest of your beer, and your fingers clamp around the sleek aluminum, folding them in until all air escapes. After, you say you want to watch something else that is fun and light-hearted.
You stream Stargirl, and on the screen, we see a girl still playing dress-up at fifteen. She fights off villains, twirling her magic staff, curls cascading down the curve of her back. Schoolgirl by day, superheroine by night, and I suddenly remember why I don’t like streaming Stargirl. She’s a goddess showing mercy to men, and I want to tell her the truth about life and love that she has yet to know at fifteen—that some people really aren’t worth saving.
Titanic
By J Buentello Benavides
I received a fortune from an older woman in a Japanese shrine who told me I would find true love at an old age. At eighty-six, she said, calmly, wisely, not knowing I already found the love of my life at forty-two even though she called off the engagement six months ago because I accidentally ran over her dog. I told the wrinkled woman thank you, went back to my hotel, and texted back that fling from Tinder I screwed two months back. In between texts, my fling says, When you’re back in the states, come over. We’ll eat good food, make out, and watch Titanic.
When my vacation ends, she invites me over, buys us some Whataburger, and turns off the lights in her living room while her projector whirrs to life, combing the air for lint and strands of orange cat hair. Dust drifts across the flickering slant of light, and my fling puts on her favorite film, saying, I adore how Titanic depicts true love in such a vulnerable way. Even though I’ve seen the movie a million times before, I still don’t like the ending where Jack tells Rose not to let go, but she lets go anyway.
And okay, I know what Jack really means when he tells her not to let go. He means don’t let go of living life once I’m gone, but that’s easier said than done, and when a faint light blooms over Rose’s frosted cheek, she realizes the golden glow comes from a lifeboat. She wiggles her wrist, freeing her frozen hand from Jack, and there he goes, sinking, slipping away. A slow drop and then nothing. His body disintegrating into darkness. When my fling places her hand on my upper thigh, inching closer to my fly, I think back to the fake fortune from the old woman at the Japanese shrine.
At eighty-six, I imagine that I’ll still be alone, tired of breathing and tired of reminiscing as I limp down the sidewalk of my neighborhood, shoving my walker forward. In the distance, I’ll hear a familiar yelping from behind my neighbor’s trimmed hedges. A sort of gasping and gurgling. A screaming filtered through water like when the Titanic finally sank, sucking its victims into the freezing current, swallowing them alive. I’ll head to my neighbor’s backyard to find her yorkie drowning in their pool, but by the time my brittle legs jump over the edge, the waves will have already settled. I’ll stay there, floating, freezing, begging God to bring back to life what has died in my hands.
Ghost Hands
By J Buentello Benavides
After the death of their father, Melanie takes her seven-year-old brother, Mario, to the haunted train tracks in San Antonio because he wants to see if the ghost children will leave their fingerprints on the back of their car. With both of their hands, they smear baby powder over the rear window, smudging it downwards, gliding their fingers over the trunk and spilling any excess powder over the bumper. An uneven layer coats the backside of their car like melting patches of sleet over gravel.
“Why are the ghost children stuck here again?” Mario asks, wiping his hands against the front of his red t-shirt. Melanie doesn’t recall every detail of the local legend their father once told them, but she summarizes it for her little brother, saying, “Years ago, children died here when their school bus stalled on these tracks. If you stop here, they’ll push your vehicle out of harm’s way.”
When they get back into the car, Melanie stops in the middle of the train tracks, setting the shifter to neutral, and a sudden rumbling vibrates the seats beneath their thighs. Melanie’s sneakers never touch the gas pedal. The car glides slowly over the tracks, moving forward, heading towards thinning brush in the distance. Once the last two tires cross the final track, Melanie shifts to park, and Mario swings the door open, screaming, “The hands! The hands!” Tiny finger and handprints spot the trunk and rearview window in irregular patterns.
“The legends are real,” Mario whispers. His index finger traces a circle around some of the smaller ghostly prints, and he drags it sideways over the baby powder, towards the trunk and taillights. He stops next to a faded outline of a much larger handprint located on the bumper.
“Look!” he cries. “It’s Dad!”
The thin handprint looks faded, misshapen, sad—nothing like the thick fingers of her father, muscular from years of wrapping them around the wooden handles of hammers, shovels, and rakes. Sunburnt with peeling skin from years of construction, toiling long hours in Texas heat. Calloused fingertips from strumming that old guitar Melanie buried somewhere in the back of her closet, cloaked behind hanging dresses. Those hands molded his daughter like the wet mound he morphed into her favorite mugs. Look, baby, he said to Melanie once after someone smacked her ass at the gas station. This is how you form a fist. This is how you fight back. This is how—
“Can’t you see his hand?” Mario asks. “Can’t you see any of the hands?”
“Hmm,” Melanie hums, waiting, thinking. “Maybe I do see them,” she says, squinting and tilting her head a little bit, holding out hope for something she knows isn’t there.
J Buentello Benavides
J Buentello Benavides is a writer, teacher, editor, and translator. She is a Hedgebrook writer-in-residence alumna, and among her other awards, her writing has been named finalist for the Newfound Prose Prize, finalist for The Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.