Fix

laughs again. “Minnesota it is.”

Collage
A tiny piece of
Lidia—her
favorite hair tie—pinned
over the light switch
so not to be
forgotten.
This is how it
began.
For whatever reason,
the hair tie stayed there, joined soon after
by a picture of a swimming pool I cut from
a magazine—I’d always wanted a swimming
pool.
Next came a page
ripped from The Little Engine
That Could—a happy group of
fruit and candy.
That night,
the growing collection won
a smile from my mother.
“A collage,”
she noted.
A collage.
Pieces of my life tacked,
taped, and glued onto
the green wall across from
my bed.
After a few years, I began
a second assemblage in the center
of the wall, gluing
two sets of eyes cut from
third-grade school photos—
Lidia’s and mine.
“So creepy,” Lidia said. But
she laughed. And
I added our noses.
Gradually, I surrounded
the pieces of our faces with
other pieces of us.
Tickets to a
movie my grandparents took us to see,
Lidia’s mother’s business card
because I didn’t know what else
to do with it, a fast food
cup Lidia told me not to touch
when I plucked it from the curb
to throw in the trash. With the germs
already settling in on my hands, I carried it
home and
stapled it to the wall.
The collage surrounding the light fixture
spawned the collage surrounding our eyes
spawned another and another, until
my wall resembled
the effect of multiple rocks
thrown into a green pond, rippling outward.
Each original piece
the sun
in the solar system
of my bedroom wall,
or, as Lidia liked to call it:
“A vertical mess.”
She wasn’t wrong. Collage wasn’t beautiful.
Not in the way a single photograph or
a painting might be. It was clunky, uneven,
and random.
When we jumped to middle school, the
collage jumped to a second wall—
Our seventh-grade algebra homework,
shredded and shellacked.
A ferocious act of release.
A testament to mathematical fortitude.
Art.
Then a spray of notes
passed between us through eighth.
Each scrap
torn apart
words scattered.
We didn’t need them whole
to know what we’d said.
Over time, the green paint of my walls
disappeared, and my bedroom became
a world made up of
other worlds made up of
other worlds, so that
my desk, the bed, the telescope, me—
we are all just pieces in the
collage.


Lidia Returns
I WAKE TO THE SOUND OF WIND GUSTS FLAPPING THE LOOSE siding of the old triple-decker. Naked tree branches swing in and out of the square view from my window. A flock of birds flies across a gray morning sky.
They remind me of something. Something I can’t remember. A warm feeling of hope flutters in my stomach.
Then I see why.
Lidia is here.
“Hi,” I croak, my voice still asleep.
She smiles that Lidia smile that shows up in her eyes even more than on her mouth. “Get your lazy ass out of bed,” she says. “You’re sleeping the whole goddamn day away.”
“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, my eyes watering.
“You’re such a fucking wimp.” She laughs. Hopping up, she neatly pushes in my desk chair with her one hand, and I remember the other. I remember it all.
“Lid,” I whisper. “Lid, I—I’m—”
“Oh, look.” She cuts me off, walking over to my window. “It’s starting to snow.”
Snow?
Minnesota.
I turn to my telescope and silently mouth the words:
Thank you.
Lidia takes one look around my room and gets to work. She stacks my books into a neat pile. She refolds the extra blankets that had slid off the end of my bed. She picks up the dozens of pieces of shredded tissue littering the floor surrounding my bedside, placing them inside one of the three half-empty glasses of water sitting stagnant on my bedside table, all the while complaining about my destructive habit. She’s overly familiar with my love of ripping things into tiny pieces so I can build something new out of them later. Just as I’m overly familiar with her extreme love of tidiness. She doesn’t miss a single shred.
Lidia, who has cleaned my room a thousand times. Lidia, who I haven’t seen for so long. I can’t take my eyes from her, or stop smiling, or keep the tears from running down my cheeks and into my pillowcase.
Her job complete, she heads to the kitchen, expertly balancing a pile of dirty dishes and trash. Even though she was born with a single hand, not much ever got in Lidia’s way.
Not the cardboard milk cartons from kindergarten that said Open here, and never did.
Not the rope that snaked its way thirty feet up to the rafters of the middle school gym.
Not the complex microscopic system of threading a sewing machine, the tedious building of a kinetic sculpture out of toothpicks, the impossible physics of a chin-up bar… not even team sports, where a sweaty symmetrical body seemed a requirement.
Lidia would ache, strain, sweat, boil, grunt, tear, smash, leap, quiver, burn, and bleed before failing to accomplish it all.
Lidia pops her head back into the room.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she says.
That’s your trick, not mine, I think through closed eyes, because she’s already gone.


Something I Don’t Know
“Lid,”
I whine.
“Lidia, you’re sleeping.”
It happened every time I slept over.
Lidia would fall asleep
and I’d be left
awake.
“I’m not,” she mumbled,
completely sleeping.
“Tell me something I don’t know,”
I urged.
“Play the game.”
We played this game
all the way through elementary
and into middle school.
Our own version of truth or dare.
Because I knew
everything about her
and she knew
everything about me, the
tiny things we divulged in the dark
were scraped from the sides
of our thoughts. We liked to say
they were the things
that grew our brains
together.
A stolen answer
on a vocab quiz.
An orange penis
discovered in her parents’ dresser drawer.
Songs whose lyrics
we ached to think
might one day
be about us.
The thing we wished we’d said
to some jerk,
instead of the thing
we did say.
The shocking discovery of the belt
that went with the penis.
Lying together in the
dark. The walls
as familiar as our skin,
and the warm air a soft cushion
on which to place the
somethings we didn’t know
so that everything was
known.
Everything.
“Come on, Lid,”
I complained.
“Play.”
Watching her sleep, all
beating heart and breath—free
from being capable, sensible, punctual
Lidia—she became even more beautiful
than she already was.
“Lid,” I tried
hopelessly.
“I love you, Eve,”
she whispered
through a final sleepy yawn.
I sighed.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”


Just Like It Always Was
THE