the blueshift journal

          My mom―patron saint of fuzzy dice, crucified Christ pendants, and acrylic nails―never grows older in any of my daydreams.

          She sits frozen, youthful, unchanging, like in the wallet-sized Star Shots photo I keep in my old velvet-lined music box, alongside a yellowing photo of Selena and a stolen condom.

          My mom made a pretty chola. Her hair used to sit piled up on her head, black as death and shot through with blonde, all faded at the roots. She pencilled her eyebrows thin and lined her mouth thick. Most days she wore her dad's flannels and sometimes his work shirts, with the name Jorge still embroidered at the breast.

          She never smiled in any pictures.

          My father bled in this shirt, you know, 17-year-old her says to me in one particular daydream, pointing at his fading name with a single bloody, claw-like nail. She says it through her teeth and ash falls from the burning cigarette wedged between them. There is lipstick everywhere.

          That’s how I remember my mom these days―messy and red. Sometimes she’s pregnant with my unborn brother Ignacio and crying. She’s like a timelapse clip. Flat belly growing as a moon rises from her womb, then sits beached beneath the skin of her belly. Mascara wets her face till she looks like a weeping la Virgen de las Penas statue. She smells of myrrh and oil and my nose stings with it.

          Though she features heavily in most of my daydreams, there are others too.

          Sometimes I can see my dad gathering her to his chest by the wrists, shaking her, his mouth moving. He's always mute in this daydream. I wonder if all male violence becomes like that, once you're old enough to forget which man is shaking your mom on which night.

          When I was a girl, my mom sat on the edge of the tub while I bathed. She’d comb my
hair, or giggle on the phone with her girlfriends, or pick at her nails while staring at the dirty ceramic tiles in a blank-faced silence. Sometimes she played music––old, soft-sounding stuff, like “La-La Means I Love You” by the Delfonics––and cried loudly over the sound of the tub running. I always wondered if it was because of my dad.

          I dream up so much now, I often can't tell recollection from reinvention. I remember or reinvent empty baseball fields behind our old apartment. In this dream, I sit on a diamond by myself and watch the sun set behind the trees. My dad calls me home eventually, though I have a hard time finding my way back through the brush. I return home all scratched up and he laughs when he sees, shaking his head. Then he tells me to stay in the living room and he retreats to his bedroom, locking the door. I understand, distantly, that my mom is inside too, and hear ugly noises from within. I squeeze my eyes shut, but I still see my mom, knees ground into the carpet, and my dad’s penis rusting in her throat.

          In one recollection/reinvention, my dad is driving down the alley in his red pickup truck. There's a bloody-mouthed tulip woman who is not my mom in the passenger seat and for some reason―maybe the subconscious hostility I feel for her―I know she's his girlfriend. I see her black nails tracing the rim of his cupholder and fury fills me to the brim.

          In another, we're speeding down the highway in broad daylight. I realize that we're driving in the wrong direction right as we collide with another car. My dad orders me to look away, but my young mind is drawn to the gore like a moth to prayer candles. I see a man's neck crack audibly and know he's dead. The rest of the way home I sense that we have committed a grave injustice and I feel something like shame and fear of retribution burgeoning within me.

          I ask Jesus if I'm going to hell the following Sunday, but I immediately forget his answer, so a phantom anxiety follows me home for the next five years. I remember the man's neck cracking at inopportune moments ― as I'm ordering ceviche at Northgate, while painting my mom's toes red, while cleaning out our ashtrays in the grass.

          Sometimes I'll tell my brother Jason about the dreams/memories/reinventions, and he'll get a fuzzy look in his eye, then say, "I don't remember any of that."

          I asked him once if he remembered sleeping next to dad as kids, when we could only afford one bedroom and one huge mattress, and one night dad was having sex with the bloody-mouthed tulip virgin beside us, whose face I can no longer recall. She’s veiled in my memories, or blond, or wearing a dollar store masquerade mask. I remember looking over in a panic, into the dark shadowy corner where two clumps were moving in tandem. I saw his face in the dark–– my dad’s––looming above me, angry somehow. And he pinched me hard and ordered me to turn over and stay quiet, so I did, frozen there like that until he grunted, once, and left for the bathroom.

          When I tell Jason this, he looks at me and goes, "¿Estás loco, Eileen?"

          After that, I wonder. Still, I close my eyes and see a stretch of tattooed brown ― my father's back ― which reads, pero yo y mi casa, serviremos al señor. I think it's an old Bible verse. I see my mom's body laid out across a table as if in sumptuous feast, like in a surrealistic version of The Last Supper, but I don’t know who’s feeding.  I see Jason's silhouette on the far side of the bed, shoulders hunched.

          In my most favorite daydream, my mother is brushing my curls out for a photo, bobby pins sticking out of her mouth like pointy teeth. She keeps crooning, ay, niña, and frowning, looking forlorn. I feel at peace, watching her through our vanity mirror. I notice one of her hoop earrings is missing and her left earlobe is bleeding, but before I can point this out, she starts pulling my hair into a tight ponytail. It's painful, but I don't mind so long as I get to look at her face.

          "Eileen, no te preocupes," she says.

          Tonight I revisit this daydream. For a while, I let her brush my hair while my mind idles. Then I ask, "Why do you never smile in your old pictures?"

          "Why should I?" she says, tying my hair off with a thin liga.  

          I twist backwards to get a good look at her and find the bed empty. This is always my least favorite part. I glance into the mirror again, but she has vanished.

          For a while after my mom died, I wondered why she did it. I was young, and shaken, and had no use for my nail polishes anymore. I wondered if, like Shakespeare's Ophelia, which we were studying in English class at the time, she had been driven to madness by the men in her life.  

          I'd look at my dad in the mornings after the funeral, searching him for shame.  

          He has never looked me in the eyes since her death. I think he has lost the ability to stare upon a woman without feeling what I felt when the man's neck snapped on the dream freeway.