I can bend spoons. I learned it from a psychic on TV. I bend all that we have by just thinking about bending them. Our mother moves her chair away from me.

“Oh, merde, and you’re my flesh and blood,” she says.

“Bend this,” Louisa says. She brings me the gun.

“I can only bend so much,” I say, handing it back to her. I can bend things no more than the weight of spoons and sometimes keys. They hand me keys to our father’s parents’ house. The house he used to live in as a boy.

“These are useless,” they say and hand me the keys and I hand them back bent and say they are more than useless now.

Our mother trips on books we have left on the floor and won’t get up.

“I’m hurt,” she says.

“Oh, sure,” Louisa says. Our mother feels her pulse.

“I’m hardly here,” she says. We start to tickle her, we close in by her neck, whisper whistling in her ears, our hair mixing with each others’ and with what’s left of hers. She is laughing, saying she can’t breathe, saying yuck, her ears are wet with all our spit. She pinkie-fingers what she can, little jiggles back and forth in her canals.

“What’s that you say? What’s that you say? You’ve turned me deaf,” she says. “My own children,” she says.

The slut is shopping and thinking how the Spanish salesgirls are dying to rip off her clothes and dress her in new ones.

“No, gracias,” she keeps on saying when they hold the clothes up to her neck, the tops of hanger hooks poking the soft place underneath her chin. The clothes they come at her with are all too young. Short black leather skirts and jerseys with stitched flowers and English words sewn on, words like Energy and Girl and Toxic and Rainbow.

The girls’ dark long hair all smells of flowers and oils and their hair streams down the slut’s shirtfront as they work around her, fastening buttons and clasps, and when the slut looks in the mirror it looks like her own hair and she touches it and tosses it behind her shoulder. The girls stand back exclaiming when they’re done.

“Qué mono, de verdad,” they say.

Mono she knows means monkey. “I am a monkey, really, that’s what they’re saying to me,” she thinks. She takes the clothes off.

The girls bring the clothes to the counter, start to ring them up. The slut pulls out her wallet with the photos of Cal.

“Have you seen him?” she says.

“Su marido? Qué guapo!” they say. They look at the crystal set on the table in the photo and call the other girls over so they can all look at how lovely it is.

“No, not my husband,” the slut says. “Have you seen him?” she says again. The long-haired girls nod their heads and smile and take her credit card from her and charge her account and fold up her new clothes and put them in bags with more words on them. Words like Kick and Hot, written in bold slants on pink-colored see-through plastic.

Our brother waits outside on a bench looking at a map of the town. He keeps turning the map in a circle one way, and then the other way, trying to find where they are.

“How do you feel about a brother or sister?” the slut says.

“I’ve found the church, but which one,” our brother says, still at the map his finger on an icon with a steeple.

“I thought it was early menopause, but it’s not, I can feel kicks and bold punches,” she says.

“No, it’s menopause,” our brother says. “You haven’t seen my father for months,” he says. He starts to circle places with a pen, the consulate and passport offices and banks to change money.

“I’m too tired,” she says, when our brother wants to head first for the bank to ask if our father’s been there for transactions. They sit and eat lunch by the water instead, ordering garlic soup and rabbit with mayonnaise. The old stooped-over waiter explained to them what conejo meant on the menu by holding up his liver-spotted hands like paws and taking hops across the patio. He hopped all the way down the street and back and then stopped at their table again and bent over and waved his hand behind him like a wiggling tail.

“How do you say, ‘Whatever they pay you they don’t pay you enough?’” our brother wants to know, so he can say it to the waiter.

“Just say ‘energy,’” the slut says, “or ‘toxic.’ It means something here,” she says.

They stop on a bridge and look out over a fast-running muddy-colored river. They read in a guidebook that the bad smell in the air comes from a paper plant.

“Would you be here if you could be not here?” our brother asks the slut.

“Isn’t this the south?” she says.

“There’s the south and there’s the south and this is one south where no one wants to be,” our brother says and so they rent a car and drive over winding roads, passing walls where cars have lost control, breaking through and smashing down below. The slut holds our brother’s arm in fear the whole time that he drives.

“Let go,” he says. “I can hardly steer.”

“Stop the car,” she says.

“Here?” our brother says.

“We’ve got to look over the edge, check if we can see him in a crashed-up car below.”

“Oh, no,” our brother says, “we’re not even sure he’s here in Spain, we’re not going to start imagining him here in unimaginable accidents on top of it all.”

“You could be the godfather,” the slut says.

“I’d be the brother already,” our brother says.

“Perhaps it’s a boy, you could teach him what you know,” the slut says.

“And what would that be?” our brother says.

“Teach him not to learn what you never bothered to learn,” the slut says.