Our Own Making

In our last days we lived as fugitives.
Last Days of a Volcano
When the neighbor’s parrot showed up dead on our doorstep my mother knew it was time to go,
although she had been expecting it for a long time. The first time, it was a cat, its head torn from
its body by our dogs and left to rot in the sun beside the front gate of our driveway. The second,
when all the caterpillars on the dill bush appeared dead one morning, shrinking and covered in
dew. The parrot was the third and the last.
My mother dreamed of this before it ever began and in the later days she often woke in fear.
Because of this, much of what we owned had been in boxes for years: in the corners of bedrooms,
the pantry, the garage, locked up so that we forgot half of it ever existed. I had asked her, many
times, why, and she always responded that we would go soon; that it would not be that much
longer. The days of riots and half-whispered tales of violence frightened me, although I did not, at
the time, find any meaning in it. At six years old I watched my mother learn to fire a double-barreled
shotgun and sleep with it under her bed each night.
It was like that: years of my childhood permeated by a sense that we were always ready to run.
—
In first grade my school was shut down by protests. With nothing else to do under lockdown, we
sat in rows outside our classrooms and discussed average things, like the funny way our teacher
said things in English. We waited, sipping water, taking turns to cry or go to the bathroom. I
heard they were using tear gas and imagined the world outside like one big, grey explosion. We
hardly understood what any of it meant.
My mother, upon hearing the news, had my grandmother drive her to the nearest barricaded
street and then walked through all of it—police beatings, clusters of people crying on the streets,
blood and water—the rest of the way, just far enough from the gas that it didn’t touch her. Although
she found me trembling, I had not been quite afraid because I knew she would come. It
made no sense, in my world as I knew it, that anything could keep her away. And even though my
father had died when I was only two, it never occured to me that she likewise inhabited any state
of mortality.
Once she found my brothers and I, the four of us took a cab down to where my grandmother
waited behind the barricade in her dark green van. At red lights, my grandmother crossed herself
and prayed, the same words passing her lips over and over in whispers. She was not Catholic or
particularly religious, but she prayed often. Like my mother she had known dreams and visions