“Keep the other fuckers off my corner.” That’s the job John has for me while he’s away.

I lie on my back on the sidewalk’s corner, my arms and legs spread-eagled, asking John if this is the way he wants it done.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe they’ll just wheel their carts over this curb and on top of you and crush you,” he says. “Maybe there is no way.”

“Have you flown?” he asks. “I came by boat.”

“Never,” I say.

“I wonder,” he says, “if I’ll be cold. I was cold on the boat,” he says.

“I want to be an airborne Ranger, I want to fly the skies of danger,” our father sings, he is closing the shades, turning the lights down low in his new place so no one from the street can see in. We are eating his pickled herring on Rye King crackers. Louisa is drawing faces of boys on paper napkins and Jody is in the bathtub making bubbles with dish soap she has taken from the kitchen.

“In Spain?” our father says, and he starts to open a bottle of wine, “with your brother?”

“That’s right,” we tell him. He pours one glass of wine and drinks it down while still holding onto the bottle and then he pours himself another.

“What’s her number?” he asks and we say we don’t know and he says, “Mierda, isn’t that what they say in Spain?” We don’t answer. We lower our eyes, chewing our pickled herring on Rye King crackers.

“Isn’t it mierda?” he yells in our faces. We nod our heads. I cough on my cracker that went down the wrong way. Louisa and Jody start to laugh behind closed mouths, their own cracker crumbs spewing forth. Our father stares at us and as he does we see the blood rushing to his head, his skin now the purple of the wine. We cannot stop laughing so we all run into the bathroom and sit on the tub.

We bend over, rocking ourselves. Tears come running down our faces. He talks to us through the closed door.

“I’m tired,” he says. “Are you tired?” We don’t say anything. We can hear him turn around and slide his back down the door so he is sitting on the floor now. We can hear him gulping at his wine.

“Why don’t you go home,” he says to us. We call our mother before we leave to tell her we’re on our way.

“Don’t forget money,” she tells us. And so at the door, before we leave, we hold out our hands to our father and he laughs and in our hands he places lint from his pockets instead of money. “Jesus, Dad,” we say, and let the lint sail back behind us.

“Tell your mother maybe next month. Tell your mother she’ll just have to wait,” our father says.

When we get home we tell our mother there is no money. She nods her head and takes a drink of her drink and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

She turns on the news to calm down and I see there’s a bombing overseas and I swear I think I see John walking in circles in the middle of a road with his hands blown off. I imagine him back on the corner, his hands now hooks shaped like tongs custom-made to seize floating hot dogs from their bins.

“Let’s go,” Louisa says to me and Jody and so we leave and we’re out on the street and it’s a warmer night than we’ve had in a long time. We go to the park. Sit on the edge of the fountain, dangle our bare feet in the dark water. I can hear the clomp of hooves, my stallion patrolling the paths behind me. We look for change and find only pennies. We go to the pier, where Manolo’s car sits parked, only it’s rocking side to side and he’s in it and the windows are steamy and there’s the sound of the chassis squeaking as he moves inside with what must be one of the whores. We sit on the edge of the pier, saying we’re thankful our feet don’t reach the water from where we are, the river so dark who knows what would come swimming by and bite us. We go back home and play with the Ouija board but instead of moving across the printed letters, the pointer jumps to our laps, goes up our legs, our arms and breasts. All because we asked it who stole Louisa’s bicycle from our hallway.

“This is a pervert spirit,” Louisa says and she gets up from the game and goes to sit in her chair in front of the television, and the pointer jumps out from under our fingertips and moves across the floor towards her. We stand on our chairs and scream and the dog comes over and barks at the pointer and smashes down on it with her paw and then takes it in her mouth and thrashes her head back and forth. We throw the Ouija pointer and its board out the back window after the dog’s chewed the plastic.

Our mother can’t believe we threw the Ouija game out back. She says it’ll lure spirits up from anywhere and everywhere, every Tom, Dick, and Harry spirit from other people’s homes or passing by the avenue will now be drawn to where we live.

Our father is baking. We are at the oven window looking in, seeing through grease on the glass what our father calls his key lime pie. He bends close to us to look too and his smell comes at us strong. The oven’s baking more than pie. The cotton of his striped shirt, his rolled back cuffs, the hairs at his arms, the patches of dried brown skin on his hands are cooking too. They smell of things between things—the legs spread wide, the spaces between travel-weary toes, the crease below our mother’s breast that meets her rib, that is what our father smells like.

“Hotsy totsy newborn Nazi,” our father says, admiring the loftiness of his meringue, its beaded sweating hollows and its curled tips.

We are at our mother’s neck touching the wobbly moles, swearing there are more there than the last time we looked and also a hump there we haven’t seen, a muscle, she says, so big and hard it could be the Hope Diamond. We poke and press it, telling her we want to know what it feels like. We tell her we want to know if we can see it sparkle through her skin and she bats her hands behind her head at ours and yells at us to stop.

It is her birthday and all she wants is P & Q and we ask her instead to name something we can wrap with paper and ribbon. We snip our scissors in the air and twirl our tape rolls on our fingers, holstered and ready for the duel. She drinks more on her birthday and smokes more and our place is red in the night with the exit light on in the hallway, the electric off again. We huddle by its glow singing her her birthday song in shorts, our legs crossed and red on the cool dusty wooden hallway floor.

“Oh, the dog, fuck,” we say, we have forgotten to feed her because there is nothing to feed her. We call her over, our mother lets her lick her fingers from where she has dunked them in her drink. While our dog stands sideways to us we press our heads against her fur, roll ourselves against her ribs, hold her legs, listen to the workings of her hungry gut. We hang off her neck, admire her black wavy gumline, its ridges cupping foamy drool. Our mother cries and we lower our heads and Louisa says isn’t it funny how little you can see in red light.