OFIC Magazine, Issue Number 10
Ma referred to her brother Mitch as a dry drunk and told me to stop dancing in the living room. When I sought to hide in the bathroom, Ma heel-stepped behind, closing the door. “Your dancing might provoke,” she said, an eyebrow raised like a gangster in a noir film. Her words jabbed. I caught my breath with the revelation my body in movement was seen as an invitation and had brought up some root terror in Ma, a hunkered secret she wouldn’t part with, but only allude to. “Don’t tell him I told you that.”
I had just turned seventeen when Ma and I found ourselves holed up in the spare bedroom of her on-the-wagon brother’s motel-like apartment in El Monte — the rat-butt section of Los Angeles County. Ma and Uncle Mitch ventured out west separately from godforsaken Chicago.