Pt. 1 of 4
Anthony Tinoco 

Before the city, there was the hill, above San Juan, Puerto Rico. The house sat halfway up it, a square of cinderblock the color of old teeth, with a roof patched in sheets of tin that sang a rusty, metallic song whenever the wind passed through.

Anthony, small enough then to be called Anto by the old ladies, learned the hill with his feet. Bare soles found the cool seams between broken concrete, toes curled around the lip of a pothole as a truck grumbled past and shook the iron bars on the windows. He measured distance in steps; the three houses down to the store where they sold sweet bread and little packets of candy, the six more to the street where the men slapped dominoes and shouted.

Inside their home, the floor was tile and always damp, the kind that crept up the legs of the table and left rings on chair rungs. A fan chopped the air, wobbly on its stand, pushing heat from one wall to the other. Their mother smoked by the window when she was home. When she was good, there was rice and sliced salchichas in a dented pot. 

Marco knew how to stretch food. He picked it up early and passed it on to Anthony; add more water to the beans, cut the hot dogs thinner, burn the sugar a little in the pan so the plantains tasted caramel. He wore other boys’ sneakers, too big and laced tight. He was eleven, five years older than Anthony, and had already started hanging out with older boys on the block, soaking up the way they moved, talked, and laughed. 

Samuel was two, and he followed Anthony everywhere, like a smaller shadow with scabbed knees. He didn’t like the tin roof when it screamed. He’d put his hands over his ears and lean into Anthony’s shoulder until the storm moved on.

On good days, the neighbourhood boys turned trash into games. They drove a bald tire down the hill with sticks. They flicked bottle caps across the steps like little saucers, betting nothing, keeping score with chalk if they could find a nub. A kite made from a plastic bag and two sticks rose on a reckless gust and shocked them by staying up. On the best days, someone’s uncle strung a hose across the alley and the water came out weak but cold. Kids lined up in underwear and cut-off shorts, shrieking, the smell of wet dust shooting straight into the sky.

On bad days, the power cut and the fridge sweated onto the floor and the fan went still. Heat opened like a mouth. The cupboards were bare because their mother had gone to the bar with the flickering TV and drunk the money away. When the rain came, the roof stuttered and clanged, and they had to drag out the buckets, the blue one first because it didn’t leak back, then the battered green one for the corner over the stove. Anthony slept to their rhythms on a thin mattress he shared with Sammy, listening for the one that filled too high, the one that would make him rise, dump it out and set it back in place.

School was a walk down the hill. Shoes were optional until a teacher said they weren’t, and even then they were optional if you didn’t get caught. Anthony learned numbers by counting coins, learned letters on the red-and-blue-lined paper that curled when you pressed too hard. Sometimes he didn’t go. Sometimes no one did. The hill taught other lessons. How to tell a storm by the color of the clouds, who to avoid when their eyes went glassy, how to keep your mouth closed around fear so it didn’t taste like anything.

The slum had a sound in the dark that only kids heard. A hum beneath the crickets, the hiss of the power lines, a rattling in the gutters that might have been lizards or might have been nothing. Anthony lay awake and listened to it, alert even in his smallness, tugged by a feeling that the world was bigger than the hill and also exactly the size of the hill. 

Doña Tere lived four doors down. She was a thin, small woman who looked older in the face than her years, her skin lined deep around the eyes and mouth. Her hair was a heavy black mass, falling past her shoulders in dense spirals that caught the light and twist it into themselves. She wore washed-out house dresses patterned with flowers that had long since surrendered their color to the sun. A little crucifix swung against her collarbone when she moved. One of her sons was dead, claimed by the street, the other sat in a prison cell for the same kind of life. She carried both losses in the way she held herself, a strength molded out of necessity. She had spanked Sammy and Anthony once or twice, but never with malice. With them, her voice could soften, her hand could rest lightly against Anthony’s cheek, and for all her sternness, they knew she meant kindness.

He liked her, because she noticed everything. If he limped, she saw the blister before he thought to be embarrassed. If Samuel had snot on his upper lip, she wiped it with the bottom of her dress and then clucked at herself for ruining clean clothes that weren’t really clean. When she sent them to the store for a carton of eggs or a sack of beans, she always pressed something sweet into their hands when they came back. On the hottest afternoons, a limber pulled from her freezer, tamarind, coconut, or bright red cherry that stained their tongues and lasted as long as they could pace the alley.

Doña Tere set a plate and a glass of milk in front of him. She sat down next to him at the small table and bowed her head. Anthony laced his fingers together the way she did, elbows sticky on the plastic tablecloth. He closed his eyes, tight at first, then peeked through one lid. She was still praying, so he squeezed them shut again until she finished. 

“Amen.”

“Amen,” he echoed.

Doña Tere slid the plate closer, rice and beans steamed in front of him. 

“Where are your brothers?” 

Anthony lifted one shoulder. “Sammy was with me. Then he wasn’t.”

“Marco?”

He shrugged again. She clicked her tongue, before tearing a piece of fried plantain in half. She slid the bigger piece onto his plate.

“And your mom?”

“I don’t know.” He remembered her bursting in a few days back, scooping up clothes, then vanishing again. He couldn’t tell if it had been two nights ago or three. 

“You know that corner, the one where the older boys stand? That place is trouble. Boys who stand there end up in two places. Jail or the cemetery. God sees, even if I don’t.”

Anthony nodded. He didn’t really understand God, only that He was big and always watching. The adults said He had a power no one else did, which made Anthony feel safe and scared at the same time. 

“God likes little boys who walk straight,” she went on. “Not boys who stand in bad places and learn bad habits.”

“Marco goes.”

“Marco is making grown-up mistakes. He is choosing the crooked road,” she said. “You won’t. You’ll be good. You’ll tell the truth, you won’t take what isn’t yours, you’ll help your brother, and you’ll come home before dark. That’s a righteous life for a boy your size.”

He nodded again. It sounded easy enough. Walk the straight way, tell the truth even when it stung, hold Sammy’s hand, be home before the streetlights hummed. If he kept the rules, said please and thank you, and didn’t touch what wasn’t his, the world would stay kind around him. 

Doña Tere took his chin between two fingers. “What a face,” she smiled. “Handsome like your papa. Ay, don't roll your eyes at me. One day you’ll break hearts, and I’ll just say I told you so.”

He had never met his dad, so the words didn’t mean much. For the longest time, he thought Sammy’s dad was his, until he realized the three of them each had different fathers. He still liked the compliment and leaned into her hand, like a cat shameless about the sun.

News of the move came suddenly. They were going overseas to live with their Tío Gabriel, his mother’s older brother. Tío Gabriel had left the island long before Anthony was born, so to him the man was just a name. His mother had mentioned him only a handful of times, always with a certain awe, how he lived in a country that wasn’t as broken as theirs, a place with money and clean neighborhoods, where houses were painted fresh and people smiled.

Marco seemed more excited than their mother. He kept saying this was their chance to be rich. The word rich didn’t mean much to Anthony, except maybe air-conditioning you didn’t have to share, but he liked the sound of it anyway. More than that, he liked the way Marco’s face lit up when he said it. Sammy had cried at first, convinced everyone else was leaving and he’d be left behind.

They didn’t have much to pack, just a few shirts, worn shoes, and odds and ends that barely filled the bags. It was sad to leave his friends behind, and the thought of flying to another country made his stomach twist, but excitement thudded louder than fear. He pictured a big house where every door had its own key, a bed that belonged only to him, a fridge stuffed full of food that never ran out, lights that never went out and shoes that fit the first time you tried them on. He told Sammy they might live in a building with an elevator, with roofs so strong that not even the hardest rain could sneak inside.

It wasn't until he ran down to tell Doña Tere that his happiness knocked loose from where it had lodged, as he realized that she wouldn't come with them. It felt like he stepped into a hole he hadn't seen. 

 “But why?” 

Doña Tere sat Sammy and Anthony down at the table as if they had come over for supper, even though no food was on it. She smoothed the plastic cloth with the heel of her hand. 

“Because this is my home, son. God planted me here.”

“We’re going to have a really big house,” Anthony insisted. “You can have your own room.” 

She gave a sad smile. “I'm too old to start over, Anto. My place is here. With my sons.”

Anthony didn’t understand what she meant. Her sons weren't anywhere she could visit. He didn't know what else to say. He cried, and she did too, and Sammy was crying because they were crying. 

“You'll go far and you'll live good. I feel it in my heart.” She pulled both boys into her thin arms, pressing their faces against the faded flowers. The crucifix at her collarbone was cool against Anthony’s temple.

The plane was a hallway with wings. Takeoff felt like a magic show. The runway rushed at them and then the world tilted and his stomach dropped and the buildings let go. San Juan and the hill and Doña Tere’s doorway fell backward into a toy city, the water turning into a sheet of foil. He put his forehead on the window and breathed fog onto the oval, rubbing a clean hole with his knuckle. Clouds were not fluff up close, they were land the plane floated over, white fields with no fences. 

When the seatbelt sign dinged off, the plane became a neighborhood. People stood and reached over each other for bags they didn’t need yet. The bathroom was a closet inside the sky and the water came out angry and cold. 

Landing was the opposite of faith. Wheels hit the ground and the whole plane decided to be a machine again and not a miracle. Everyone clapped like they’d helped. 

Tío Gabriel met them at the airport. He was a small man with a round belly that pressed against his shirt buttons. His hair was thinning on top and slicked back too carefully, the gray showing through the black dye, and when he smiled a wide gap split his two front teeth. His nose sat crooked, like it had been broken once and never fixed. He kissed their mother on the cheek three times, then clapped Marco hard on the back. He ruffled Anthony’s hair with a heavy hand that smelled of tobacco, and scooped Samuel up with a grunt, holding him close like he’d been waiting years for the chance.

The apartment wasn’t an apartment so much as a room that tried hard. A couch that turned into a bed, a table that folded its wings, a kitchenette that made the whole place smell like whatever it cooked. The window didn’t open all the way. The radiator clicked and banged and then sighed, like a tired animal trapped in the wall. Neighbors argued through thin paint in a language Anthony didn't understand. They slept on mattresses that sounded like bags of chips. 

Tío Gabriel was nice. When he was alone with Sammy and Anthony, he filled the space with loud laughter. He tickled them until their ribs ached and they begged him to stop. He would pull Anthony onto his knee and bounce him as if he were much younger. He would drag his hand through Anthony’s hair and trace a slow line along his collarbone. Sometimes he made Sammy and Anthony show him the things they'd drawn, or the toys they still carried from Puerto Rico. Other times, he would quiz them on their numbers or English words. 

Days in the new country behaved themselves. Streets had lines and lights that bossed the cars. Stores had so much food he felt seasick. Milk came in gallons heavy as Sammy. Men with name tags asked if they needed help. Tío Gabriel showed them a park with grass that wasn’t a field for soccer but a place for dogs in sweaters. 

Some mornings he woke up and forgot where he was. Some nights he fell asleep imagining the plane again, how it had taken the hill, made it small, then smaller, until it turned into a memory. Mostly he thought of Doña Tere. He wondered if her kitchen got lonely without him at the table. He wondered if missing someone could be so strong it made you feel she was still beside you, even when she wasn’t.

Author’s Note: 

Hi~! 

Thanks for sticking with this story. I really poured a lot into this chapter, but I do need to give a little warning. This one goes into heavier territory, so please read at your own pace. 🖤