BLUE RABBITS — MONIQUE QUINTANA
/The white spot leaps through the grain as we eat on the terrace, overlooking the knots of trees. This night, the pale older woman made us salmon trapped from the stream, the butter warm in our mouth, the meat of it pinked and new. This is her house, and we are her guests. My love has a red blanket draped over his shoulders. His eyes are like black rabbits caught in a cage. He told me once that he believed that he and I lived below chinampas in another life. We had many children that revered the maíz. We learned to irrigate the land, with birds bleating in the air the same way that lambs do. That woman who cooked our meal, she is the kindest woman person we have met this week. This is her house, and we are her guests. We can hear faintly humming off in the distance. We can smell the soap that she runs over her body in hot water. We can see her floating in her tub, so blue and radiant. We have not been treated well in the city, the city underneath the trees. Our brown skin shimmers in the lights, and they can see it. They detest the curve of our eyes, the resistance to the way they mangle our surnames in their mouths, a linguistic butchery. They eye our clothes, our oversized jackets with the patterns of our people. My love had to stop me from telling off the cashier at the airport after she gushed over the other people in the shop but barely looked in our direction. They see us. I know that they can see us, I tell him. He hooks his arm in mine, he hums softly, and I can smell his skin as if it's burning. He drums his fingers on the wheel of our rental car while he drives us to the older woman's property. She lets us pay her with our credit card, swiping it on a machine, leaning over. She smells like cold flowers like her skin is made from the lake. We stay in a rectangular tent overlooking the water, sleeping in a bed of gold, my love's cold mouth on my sharp coat buttons, on my throat, the honey and sugar rising in the air from the pale woman's kitchen. When she calls us up to the house for dinner, she tells us about each piece of food that she has prepared for us. There are blessings in all the things that we give, but more in the things that we take. She says she has made these things in the old way, in the form of her ancestors. Looking out, there are tall blades of grain, and I know, my love and I are far from our ancestral land, the grain, tall and bright, the trees hung over in blue, deeply, the white spot leaping, nearer and nearer and nearer to us still.
Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and 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 artist fellowships to Yaddo, The Mineral School, Sundress Academy of the Arts, the Community of Writers, and the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat. She is a contributor at Luna Luna Magazine, and you can find her at moniquequintana.com.
