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There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

THOUGHT #3

Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?

THOUGHT #1

And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.

THOUGHT #2

‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—

THOUGHT #6

And the Lord—

THOUGHT #1

So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

LULU: Mr. Marcus, I didn’t even want to waste your time. Pride and Prejudice is not a book that makes for a teleplay.

MARTIN: Philco’s killing us with the class acts.

LULU: There’s more to classy material than rich people in mansions talking in high-class accents. There are stories to tell about the little guy, an American guy, and the contributions they make; or even fail to make. You see a bum on the street, or a woman yelling at her kids after working in a factory all day, but to really understand what causes that behavior… Each of these people had goals; they had dreams; they had disappointments. TV can get inside that, can get close, and be honest about it. That’s what’s classy.

MARTIN: So no more period pieces?

LULU: If they’re topical.

MARTIN: Pride and prejudice: sounds topical.

LULU: It’s about marriage. Today’s audience has more on their mind than who marries who.

Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.