Black Licorice by Monique Quintana
By Monique Quintana
You’ll never know any woman that loves black licorice besides your grandmother. When you drink that absinthe at the hotel in Seattle, you’ll think about her hands, as you watch the sugar cube melt to your glass. You’ll regret not getting the morning flight home. You’ll go to the same conference every year after that and you’ll cry there every year, too. Your friend from Colorado will say it’s maudlin, and in spite of yourself, you’ll acquire the taste of whisky. She’ll never cut your sandwiches in diamond shapes after 1989. You’ll be embarrassed to eat in front of men you don’t love for the rest of your life.
You’ll get hot in the face when people ask you why you’re so quiet all the time. You’ll ask your mother why the reading teacher pulled you out of class once a week, when you were the best reader in your class. Your mother will say it’s because you were quiet all the time. You’ll see the way her lemons hangs from her tea like a smile.
The happiest story you’ll ever write will be the one with the prince in the snow. You’ll collect short stories about snow because it never snows in your city. Your favorite story will be “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” You’ll watch as your classmates make papier-mâché masks of their heroes. You’ll fall in love with the white boy who makes his mask out of glass. He’ll put up posters of Christ with machine guns and bombs on his back and he’ll get detention for it. You’ll pretend not remember his name the day after he graduates. You’ll forget his name all together.
You’ll regret giving your son a biblical name, and he’ll regret it in twos. You’ll watch him sketch cowboy spurs after he splashes his face with holy water at San Juan Bautista. You’ll like to go there in springtime and eat albondigas soup and take pictures walking through flowers and cacti. You’ll see a radio poet you don’t like there and you’ll give each other the death stare and it’ll feel two times good to you.
You’ll take a picture of your sister when she’s in a pink raincoat, when she’s not looking, her feet one step under a freeway sign, the rain puddles drying up the lace in her shoes. You’ll walk around the street fair and buy berries and milk that’ll gets warm in their crisp paper sack before Pacheco Pass sounds and you’ll imagine there’s a sea monster in the reservoir, knowing that when it’s drained, it’ll look ugly inside.
You’ll fake sick to miss school and fake healthy to go to school later. You’ll write paper dolls out of demons in stories. You’ll crush lemon sticks under your tongue like meters and look for syringe shaped bubble necklaces and corset panties and black lace bra tops at the Cherry Auction on Saturdays.
Monique Quintana is from Central California and is the author of the novella, Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her short works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has also been awarded residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, the Sundress Academy of the Arts, and the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat. She was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Megaphone Fellowship for a Writer of Color and has work published in or forthcoming in the following anthologies: Graffiti (Aunt Lute, 2020), Latinx Screams (Bronzeville Books, 2021), and Remapping Wonderland: Classic Fairy Tales Retold by People of Color (Alternating Current, 2021). You can find her at moniquequntana.com
