Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
“Sewing Machines” is from Cheryl Klein’s The Commuters: A Novel of Intersections, which can be purchased here.
Querida Hortencia,
Los Angeles is beautiful in the winter. The air seems surprised by itself. Last week it rained for three days straight. Our windows steamed up in the morning as
the kids got ready for school. Fog rolled in—from the beaches, I guess—and settled on the front lawn. It made us want to eat omelets. Cielo beat the eggs and Toño chopped peppers and Lali was in charge of mushrooms. We said, today let’s forget about work and school. Let’s let the steam curl from the stove until it bleeds into the fog and we’re all fat, blurry ghosts.Melanea
She wakes up thinking about Mexico—particularly, the yellow flowers that grew outside the bedroom window in Tijuana. They were such a bright thing to wake up to. Then a shiver of 5 a.m. air would tickle her back, and she’d turn around to see the big piece of cardboard that covered the hole in the west wall of the house.
This house doesn’t have any holes, unless you count the mouse hole in the kitchen, which she finds pleasant. A home doesn’t seem complete without a mouse; there aren’t too many here, so it’s just a mouse, not a mouse problem.
It’s almost 7—Melanea sleeps later here. On her way to the closet, she stumbles over a pile of Toño’s books, which he always leaves in new and unpredictable spots despite the small space of their apartment. The “oh!” that leaves her mouth as the throb hits her toe doesn’t wake the boys, but soon Lali is sitting up on her mattress.
“Mami?”
“Go back to sleep, m’ija. I just stubbed my toe.”
“I need a costume.”
“A what?” Lali has always woken up with strange requests on her lips.
She never wants the glass of water that children are supposed to want. She wants someone to rub her growing-pain-plagued calves or to sing her a jingle from her favorite commercial. This, however, is new.
“We’re doing a play in class about important people from California history. I’m the bear on the flag.”
“Who?”
“Mami,” she groans, “he’s really important. I told my teacher you were a good sewer.”
“Is your teacher going to pay me to make you an outfit for this bear- on-the-flag?”
“Um, I guess not.”
“That’s what I thought. Why don’t you practice dressing up as a girl who’s got school in an hour?”
Lali giggles. “Yuck.”
They will all be out the door by 8: Cielo, Otoño, Lali and the two Mejía children who live with their mother on the other side of the blue shower curtain that divides the apartment in half. Melanea would like to see them off, maybe make them breakfast. It’s foggy and she is think- ing of omelets. She would like to see the outlines of their bodies grow smaller as they walk down the street, a strong posse of American children with books slung casually under their arms. But she leaves at 7:15, bathing the night before to save time, and begins her walk to the bus stop, which precedes her bus ride to the Blue Line stop.
The streets are quiet at this time of day. This pocket of one-story homes on square blocks southwest of downtown Los Angeles is a summer- afternoon place. It seems most natural when the front yards are full of children, lazy teenagers, mothers calling warnings from porches. It is a toppled-bicycle, slow-smile kind of neighborhood: poor but peopled.
A few cars muscle past her. They aren’t good cars, but they take people directly from their own driveways to their jobs. The train is like hitch-hiking—the big white tube is going where it wants to go, when it wants to go, and Melanea is just along for the ride. The Blue Line is slick and new, but it seems a little embarrassed about catching on so late. As if there is a scolding transportation god: Other cities get it, why can’t you? This morning there are only four other people in her compartment. They clutch safety poles and donuts. The man across from her has pink frost- ing caked to his lip. Melanea steals glances, and she imagines they do the same. Shameful moments of espionage that force them to disembark at the same conclusion: Nobody takes the train; they must be nobody.
On the walk from her stop to her job on Alameda, Melanea thinks that the places she frequents are stripes of overpopulation and desertion: the crowded room of mattresses she shares with her children, the hollow subway. And now there’s the bustle of Broadway, where clothing and jewelry shops overflow onto the sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. Men and women sing out prices: “Five dollars! Ladies’ purses, five dol- lars!” There are carts of watermelon, mangos and pale green honeydew arranged on carts in stoplight order. Sweatshirts smiling happy cartoon smiles all the way up to the ceilings of small stores, reaching for the ornate towers of brick and fire escape and painted-over window above. The Living Faith Evangelical Church with its gold doors and movie theater marquees. Mothers with strollers brimming, their babies wiggling and stretching like tourists in an open air bus. Black boys with junior high swagger. The smell of pan dulce in her nostrils, yeasty and sprinkled with cinnamon. An arcade thumping with bass and flashing with bells. Small boys riding stationary motorcycles, tiny vatos in their elastic waist- band jeans.
Then there’s Olympic with its piñatas, feathery strips of paper waving in the chilly air, promising a summer party. These streets, too, are better equipped for summer. The orange-vendors out front want to share the party atmosphere: bright round fruit that will fill your mouth with juice as each plump cell bursts; eat it beneath a flock of three-foot-tall red and green parrot-piñatas. Everywhere there are price tags, screaming in Español and English and sometimes Korean. Only $10! Four for only $20! Sale—only $2.99!! Everything is only.
Melanea touches her purse. It’s not as if she can stop. It’s not as if she can buy these things. But something has imbedded images in her mind: Lali open-mouthed as a parrot showers her with peppermints and tootsie rolls. Toño the slick one at school: Oh, my mom bought me these shoes, easy as a swoosh. She wants to live in the buzz of it, to suspend herself in a stream of people and things. She wants to hand someone crisp bills and fill her arms with soft clothing.
But there is still the deserted part of her journey, the part that welcomes the cold and smells better for it. The east ends of streets, gray buildings, gray curbs, empty parking meters.
There’s a man who’s figured out how to get the machines to flip coins back out without having the read-out revert to zero. She’s seen him do it—the people with cars are so tickled that they usually let him keep the coins: 25 cents to park and see a trick. He’s the only person she sees regularly on this end of Olympic, but if he’s here today, he’s lost in a thicket of fog. She can barely make out the bridge that arches over a great cement chasm at Olympic and Santa Fe, cast iron lamp posts painted gray, their round bulbs glowing a hushed yellow-white.
She makes her way up Alameda. Everything here is constructed to slightly larger than human scale—all concrete blocks and truck docks—which has an alienating effect. During this leg of the walk she repeats the mantra she has set for herself: Work hard, save, leave. It’s the only thing that pulls her through these cement mornings. Sometimes, of course, leave is a bit louder than the other parts of the mantra. These two competing ideas trouble her. If she isn’t totally committed to being the highest producer on the floor, if a voice is always saying Run away, go home early, buy some flowers, Ysabel Mejía will get you a job cleaning houses, then that voice may quietly tell her fingers to slow down, her foot to hit the pedal less rhythmically. Then she will never save enough to start her own factory.
Once she enters her building—brown brick with a painted ad for tonic peeling away from the south wall and a strip club next door—it is crowded. There are 20 women on machines that aren’t arranged in logical rows. Cutters and folders scurry along the narrow paths created by the sewing stations, depositing bundles here, picking up pieces there. Supplies tower against the wall, half eclipsing the emergency exit, and reminding them that, when they finish a piece, there is more work to be done. Melanea and the other occupants of the room, however, see the order of it, the grooved paths and the space where the finished garments will begin to pile up.
She takes her place between Domicila and the new Guatemalan girl. Melanea has been at this machine for a month. It’s one of the best, new and fast. When Melanea sits in front of it, she becomes a part of it. It hums and she hums (quietly, since the manager doesn’t like loud, distracting noises other than the loud, distracting noises of the machines). Her right foot pumps the pedal. She imagines she is at her tia’s house, where she played the piano as a little girl. She didn’t know how to play, but she liked the mysterious possibilities of the pedals. She would stretch her short legs to reach them and practice hitting different combinations of pedals and keys. The fact that her fingers and toes could make music was endlessly fascinating to her. Now her fingers and toes make clothes. She considers herself lucky to work in a shop that does mostly finishing work. She has felt the incompleteness of handing over a pile of pre- inseam jeans at the end of the day. Needlework is not music, but it is its own sort of beauty; you have something to hold in your hands, each stitch a testament. Of course, you can’t hold it in your hands for long.
Querida Hortensia,
I dream of slowness. There is texture to it, crunchy like thermal underwear. A late morning like that.
In my dream of slowness, Lali is a child from another century, her hands flat against the pages of a leather-bound book. The sort of book that would get wrapped in velvet for a move. She is not in a hurry. Her fingers leave almost imperceptible ovals of oil on the parchment. Fingerprints on fingerprints. It’s okay, I tell her, it’s our book. Those are our fingerprints, and the fingerprints of our ancestors. She nods. There is distance between the cock of her head and the lowering of her chin, and there is time. She folds her feet beneath a dress made of thick cloth, hand-stitched.
Do you remember hand-stitching? It makes me think of Mamá, the mountains she came from. We never saw them, but they are etched in my mind, her bright thread against the white and gray land. I think of her pueblo when I think of slowness, and I think of television commercials. Even though they are fast, they have time for foam on coffee, and for the glint of a fender. In my dream I fold myself into the book.
Melanea
Today they’re working on red skirts: cotton, with a diagonal hemline, a swirly ruffle, a side zipper and a little bow at the bellybutton. The diagonal hem is tricky. The Guatemalan girl isn’t getting it at all. She’s bending over her machine in a way that will make her back hurt in another hour, Melanea can tell. The floor manager, Mrs. Hong, is talking to one of the cutters, so Melanea takes a chance. She leans over and whispers, “Hold the fabric flat, but don’t stretch it. And don’t hunch over like that.”
“What? I’m sorry,” says the Guatemalan girl. Her accent is thick, and it’s not the accent of Guatemalan Spanish speakers. She must speak an Indian language. At first Melanea is frustrated. This is what they’re resorting to in order to cut down on chitchat? Then she imagines the girl making her way down thin-aired mountains to a market that con- sists of a few tables of hand-woven vests and carved gourds. At least Tijuana prepared Melanea. Got her lungs used to black smoke and her ears accustomed to car horns.
“No talk!” yells Mrs. Hong. She has the ears of a bat. She looks a bit like a bat too: big black eyes above a tiny, pointed chin.
“We were no talking. I giving her rules,” Melanea says. English is the language Mrs. Hong and her husband, who owns the factory, have in common with the workers. But none of them have a grasp of it beyond a handful of necessary words: machine, needle, bathroom, paycheck, fired. There are a thousand things a day that Melanea wants to explain, a thousand complexities that require the gentle curves and layered conjugations of Español.
The only time the workers get to say more than a few words to each other is lunchtime. Melanea eats her cold torta, barely tasting it. She’s hungry for conversation, not food. For ten minutes, they talk about any- thing but work—it’s safer that way, but it also makes the break feel more like a break. Their dialogue takes them home and to home countries, to novelas and church (not so much church lately, since Nanci has gotten a bit too inflammatory about Pare de Sufrir, her movie theater church, which Melanea thinks is silly and some of the Catholic women think is the work of Satan). Domicila retrieves her lunch from a small refrigerator in the storage room. Melanea has been taking stock for a few weeks now: a pillow lying on top a bolt of uncut cotton, a milk carton by the bathroom sink.
She pulls Domicila into a bathroom stall with her. She looks at her watch: two minutes left. Domicila’s face is inches from hers. It’s a young face, with a thick row of bangs making it more so. She has long straight eyelashes and a dark beauty mark in the middle of her nose. She looks terrified.
“Domicila, niña, tell me the truth. Are you living here?”
Domicila takes a sharp breath in, but she’s a practical woman. She knows there are only minutes remaining, so she spits it out. “Yes. Just for a little while. Mrs. Hong knows, but she said I’m not supposed to tell anyone. She said if I did homework after hours I could stay. I can pay them the rent later.”
“What happened to your apartment?”
“It was condemned by some people who thought they were doing us a big favor. These white people from one of the newspapers and some people from downtown who didn’t want to look even worse after what was written in the newspaper, I guess. I know our landlord was bad, but—” She trails off.
Melanea tries to think as fast as she can. If there were a square inch of her house available...but there isn’t.
“Los Koreanos are making you do homework? Are they going to count that toward your rent?”
Domicila looks as if she’s been caught. “I didn’t ask. I—they’re being nice, for them at least. I didn’t want to push it.”
Domicila is 27 years old. She doesn’t have a husband or children. Melanea envies her freedom and feels her stomach begin to burn when she sees how little Domicila takes advantage of it. Instead, she walks around as if she is a 27-year-old failure. I have nothing to show for myself, she’s said in the past. Melanea knows how it must be to hear the women go on about their children. Even if their piece rate is cut or they’re told that this season will be sparse on work, there are still the children: Lali got an A on her spelling test! Eduardo made two goals in his soccer game!
Melanea grips Domicila’s arms tightly. She seems suddenly liquid, like she could ooze through a crack in the floor if Melanea didn’t hang onto her.
“We’ll find you a place, a real place, not this cockroach-infested prison,” she promises. She has just signed on as a we, a frightening and exciting thought.
“Get back to work! Lunch over!” Mrs. Hong’s voice has no trouble rattling through the thin walls. Melanea is momentarily thankful—there is no time for Domicila to ask how?
Querida Hortencia,
Chicago is a purposeful city. It is made up of dark brick and laid out in rectangles. It is so square it can stand up to the snow. Straddles its feet and says, okay weather, do your worst. Chicago makes me think LA and Tijuana couldn’t be located anywhere but LA and Tijuana. We need easy weather for our broken windows and the T- shirts that we make and wear.
I got lost in Chicago six years ago. I tried to cross a street to a building that wasn’t far away, but the street kept heading down hill and under bridges until I was in another city. Chicago is a two-story city.
I wanted to take the El to get unlost. I thought that sounded so nice—the elevated train. Like you could never get shoved underground so long as you were on it. But it was so confusing, and I heard someone say, you gotta watch out, you never know where you could end up.
Melanea
It always takes her a few minutes to reorient herself at her machine. Her lunch shifts in her stomach, altering the tilt of her body to a degree only she can detect. She’s seen people hurt themselves over such tiny differences: fingers slashed and stabbed, needles grooving skin like a record.
But it’s not long before her piece count is back up. The bundle of red skirts in the basket next to her chair grows, a mound of red waiting to be ironed and stamped with the Tam Perla tag. Most of them will be stamped with Tam Perla, but some will be stamped with other names—Tammy Pearl, Tom Peral, Tam P.—to be sold on Broadway and the arteries that flow from the heart of the wholesale district. Knowing that downtown quinceñera-goers will be wearing the exact same skirts as fancy Beverly Hills women gives her a little stab of satisfaction. And they’ll pay Only $5!!
Small triumphs come and go like strips of cloth being pulled past la pata, the forked metal paw of the machine. With a whirrr, she’ll be revved up, thinking of revenge on the rich via riches of her own. Then — like the silence of a skirt being dropped on another skirt—she feels the pinch in her right shoulder blade. Then whirrr—she imagines what it would be like to gather all the workers together to demand more pay. It would be like a Cuban movie she saw, everyone standing in a mass and chanting until the boss gave in, music surging behind them. Then — the silence of dropping—she remembers how those women at Jeffrey Textiles tried to do just that and were all fired. She wasn’t there, but people still talk about it: a flood of women flushed out the heavy doors of the Maple Avenue factory, sent home at midday, laughed at: Fine, report it to the Labor Commission. Don’t forget to bring your papers. That’s always the problem — no papers. There wasn’t any music either.
She looks down at her pile. She has made nine skirts since lunch. Nine skirts worth of whirring and sighing. It’s not bad, but she must be more productive. She must go above and beyond above-and-beyond. She must ignore the pinch in her shoulder, which right now is throbbing for attention. She hushes it, promising to buy it a tube of ben-gay and, someday, a leather jacket.
Mrs. Hong is circling their little cluster of machines. She picks up a skirt from Domicila’s basket and turns it over in her hands. Her bony fingers are clumsier than those of a machine operator. She wouldn’t survive for a minute, Melanea thinks. She doesn’t like seeing such coarseness on the soft cotton. Nevertheless, the fingers find a spot where the ruffle is bunched too tightly, interrupting the regulation swing of the skirt.
“You!” she leans in and puts her face close to Domicila’s. “This is terrible! Re-do!”
“Maybe she can work on it as part of her homework tonight,” Melanea thinks venomously. Unfortunately, she thinks it out loud. She immediately puts a hand to her mouth as if feeling for the bit of lip that prompted this transgression.
Mrs. Hong spins around. “What?!” Melanea said it in Spanish, but her tone has given her away.
“I, ah...
“You—” Mrs. Hong is also at a loss. English works for repetitive, sledge hammer phrases, punctuated with exclamation points and saliva. But for moments of true, burning anger, only one’s native language will suffice. Mrs. Hong chooses the second most recognizable language: money.
“Your pay,” she says, “your pay cut 30 cents for ruffle. You slow work for everybody.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Melanea says. Those are the English words she knows the best. They depart her lips with the least hesitation, the least accent. The Spanish words inside her hate the way they sound, how they disguise themselves in soft syllables and a gentle R sound.
“Too late!” says Mrs. Hong. “You always do this!”
Melanea knows that attempting any more choked, rough-hewn argument will cut the piece rate to 25 cents. She briefly envies the Guatemalan girl, whose tongue isolates her but does not get her into trouble.
She turns back to her machine and tries to think of something else. If she lets tears well up, they will blur her vision and slow her work. Now she must work faster than ever.
The machines work like a lullaby. The steady strum of them doesn’t jive with the icicles of anger inside her, and soon the icicles begin to drip. By the end of the day they will have melted into puddles.
Melanea wakes up where the Blue Line stops. She is momentarily disoriented—adrift and fleshy in a tube of tin and newborn graffiti and a tiled room like a giant bathroom. She remembers the past hours in a flash, the way the first moments after a bad day that has been bisected by sleep are like waking to a nightmare: She is poorer than when she left home.
She tells the kids. She doesn’t mean to, but the intricate pattern she has constructed for home-talk—one of determined cheeriness, one of asking them about their days while remaining elusive about her own—begins to fray on days like this. It starts when Toño says he needs a new note- book for English class.
When she finishes a brief rant, full of tangents and descriptions of Mrs. Hong’s horrible face, Cielo says, “It’s wrong, they should be giving you a raise, not cutting your pay. They don’t even know what you said. You could say you said something bad about Domicila, not about Mrs. Hong. You could explain.”
“No,” Toño argues, “that would make Mrs. Hong think the employees are divided. She would try to take advantage of that. You can’t stoop to that—you have to show that you’re in solidarity with your people.”
A slight bend of a smile makes its way to the surface of Melanea’s face. Toño is always using words like “solidarity.” He sits spread-kneed on his mattress, plaid shirt and angry brow, schoolwork splayed around him. So what if he’s a little impractical. It’s funny—Cielo is only one year older than Toño, but that year is the difference between Cielo’s quiet, bloody birth on the dirty sheets in the house on the hill in Tijuana, and Toño’s loud birth in the echoing ward at the LA county hospital. Sixteen and 15 years later, they wear their different births on their bodies. Cielo closes books after the first page, but he takes three buses every week-day afternoon to get to West Hollywood, where he washes dishes in the back of a taco house. Toño has no job—she doesn’t know how he got that shirt—but he spends hours huddled close to his books. They are as much of an extension of him as Melanea’s sewing machine is of her. He will read hungrily and angrily, nearly tearing pages when he turns them, pausing to announce facts to anyone who is listening. His tidbits are the only reason the Mejía kids are passing any of their classes.
“You just have to stick it out,” says Cielo. “Maybe you can find a job in another factory. You’re a good worker—I’ve seen it when you’ve brought stuff home, how fast you work.”
“See,” Melanea explains, “it’s not just about being fast. Los Koreanos have to like you. Actually, I don’t think they even want to like you, but they have to think you’re not going to make any trouble.”
She can see Cielo’s brain going. “Maybe you can make the opposite of trouble—maybe you could do extra work.”
“M’ijo, I do as much as I can.”
“No, I mean maybe I could help you out.”
“What, in the middle of the night? That’s the only free time you have.”
“That wouldn’t solve anything anyway,” Toño says.
“You act so righteous, Toño, but you’re lazy,” Cielo says. “Mom will never become a contractor if she takes your advice.”
Then the boys are off and bickering. Their voices throb against the brown walls of the house. Ysabel Mejía peeks her head in and tells them to be quiet. They continue to bicker in softer voices, a mix of English and Spanish that her tired head can’t keep up with. The bare bulb over the table turns everything the color of an old photo. Her boys are at once old men and warriors and young Americans. Even Cielo is slightly strange to her—his hair, for example, mussed as if he just awoke, then gelled in place. What sort of fashion is that? He has a lot of these small traits, which Toño doesn’t share, but that’s one thing she’s noticed about this place: The trends are so different and so changing, and all crammed up against one another. Last week they were working on skirts that came with safety pins all up one side. It’s going to look like we didn’t do our jobs, she lamented. No, said Domicila, that’s the style. The messy-slick hair and the T-shirts a size too small for him, she supposes, are just one more way Cielo, like her other children, is slipping away from her, into a life grown out of wide streets and wide cars.
Throughout her brothers’ exchange, Lali sits quietly, eating a popsicle. The red juice drips down her chin and neck, turning the collar of her T-shirt a slight and sudden pink. Melanea is too tired to get mad at her for not getting another day’s wear out of the shirt. She doesn’t have it in her to count the quarters it takes to do a load of laundry, to translate that number to items of clothing sewn.
Sensing the stickiness, however, Lali notices the drip on her own. She gathers her round little chin to her neck, crosses her eyes to see the stain, looks up and opens her mouth wordlessly, stricken.
“Oh no, Mami, I spilled.”
“It’s okay,” Melanea says.
“It’s not—you’re not going to the laundromat till a bunch of days from now.”
“Shh — it’s okay.”
“Mami—” her voice desperate in the way only children’s can be over such matters, “this is my prettiest outfit!”
Lali stands up. She is wearing the stained Minnie Mouse shirt, the pink hovering ominously above Minnie’s left ear, and a red skirt from the salvation army. A size too big, the fabric stretched and puckered in odd places, it makes her look frumpy in her baby fat, as if her future is already laid out for her. A future of inconsistent reds. Melanea fights the image. It is more terrifying than being fired, than anything. This life cannot be circular, she thinks, it cannot be as secret and as externally determined as the seasons of fashion. She feels a sudden, abstract burst of outrage at whoever makes one sort of red skirt better than another sort.
If she were a contractor, she realizes, it would be her job—even more than it is now—to fill people’s red-skirted needs.
“It’s your bedtime, m’ija. Give me your clothes and put on your pajamas.”
Lali silently obeys, slipping her legs into pajama bottoms populated with fading sheep.
Querida Hortensia,
I keep remembering this man, maybe a character in a carpa? He has a face like the side view of the moon, a pointing, scandalous chin, eyes that sly out from beneath black paint. Tilde eyebrows. And, where hair and a beard would be, he has yellow petals. Yellow petals like butterscotch thumbnails. Each yellow a different yellow from the yellows next to it. He stands against a blue background; his eyes are the same blue. They don’t seem to be eyes exactly, but holes where I can see the blue shining through. I feel that we should be dancing. His head belongs to a jester world, but he has no body, just pavement-green shoulders that taper off into the edges of the canvas. Then I think, maybe it’s best that I stay still.
Melanea
She wakes up in the dark—not the shadow-dark of the early morning, but the petrified dark of night. She doesn’t know why. The neighborhood is as quiet as it ever is, which means a helicopter is circling and a radio is beating. She sits there blinking, unable to tell the difference between open and closed eyes. It seems she is always in the process of waking up or fighting sleep.
Her eyes adjust and she can see the outline of the table and of the lumps of Toño and Lali. No Cielo.
She searches dark corners with her eyes. Where would he be? He doesn’t have time for friends. He never brings anyone over, although, she supposes, there wouldn’t be room if he did. She starts to panic. She has always found rooms of sleeping people eerie; it gives her the sense that she, as the wakened one, is subject to a different set of rules and forces, and that those forces may swallow her without anyone noticing.
She nudges Toño, who groans. “Toño, wake up.”
“Mmf?”
“Where’s your brother?”
“I don’t know.” He begins to turn his broad back to her, rolling over to avoid her gaze even in the dark.
“I’m not letting you go back to sleep until you tell me. I’ll sing at the top of my lungs if I have to.”
“Fine, okay, he said he went to do some work. He said Domicila would let him in.”
“Dios. I can’t believe...It’s dangerous, and at night—” Her words, jolted from sleep, refuse to hang together.
“He’ll be fine,” Toño says. “He knows his way around. He’ll take the bus. He’s got his pocket knife.”
Melanea wishes for a world as secure as the one Toño sees. She looks at the gap of darkness, the silhouette of crumpled blanket on Cielo’s bed. There’s nothing she can do, and besides, her body would refuse it. There are only so many hours. Her body seems to have made a very precise contract with her. Now, pulled out of the agreed-upon six hours of sleep, it rebels. Her limbs turn rubbery, her shoulder aches, her mind swirls. She closes her eyes and sees tiny, flickering red skirts. There’s nothing she can do, and besides, she has work tomorrow.
Cheryl Klein was raised by a librarian and an engineer in Southern California, and attended UCLA and CalArts. She is the author of CRYBABY (Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer instead. She also wrote a story collection, THE COMMUTERS (City Works Press) and a novel, LILAC MINES (Manic D Press). And three unpublished novels, which she still thinks are pretty great. Cheryl is a Senior Editor and columnist for MUTHA Magazine, where she often writes about adoption, fear, and her hatred of LEGOs. Her stories and essays have appeared in Entropy, The Normal School, Blunderbuss, and several anthologies. Her work has been honored by Best American Essays, the MacDowell residency program, and the Center for Cultural Innovation.