It’s Easter, and the cousins from Corpus have come to visit. The tío who is bad with money, with the big backyard, goes all out. A picnic table overflows with jelly roll and concha. Another sags under the weight of an horchata jug. The air is rich with onions and pork fat. There’s a cooler big enough to bury bodies in, overflowing with Modelo and Squirt. Away from the house, there’s a lighter and enough mortars and Roman candles to take down an airplane.
There’s so much noise. 777s scream overhead. Speakers struggle to keep up with Stevie Ray Vaughn. There’s the thwack and scatter of Nerds and Bottle Caps, the young ones yipping with excitement. The older ones take the trays of cascarones and run each other down, cracking the eggs over shirts, under skirts, and into each other’s scalps. Two hours in, the yard is a mess of confetti, paper, and ash.
When the meal is over, well, as over as it’s going to be, Abuelo, fat and half-asleep, calls to me. Mijo, he says, I want to show you something. He taps the spent Cavendish from his pipe and shows me the last cascarón, unopened, crimson red. Abuelo fancied himself a healer—a curandero. I took him at his word then.
Eres joven, he says, moving the blood-colored egg between his hands, but not too young to be without sin. He presses the cascarón on my skin and tells me to breathe, tells me to close my eyes. Cold as ice, it steals the warmth from me wherever it moves. This egg, he says, this symbol of life, will clean you of sin. It will clean your bones. It will clean your blood. He taps at the door that is hidden in the back of my neck. I hear silence. I go somewhere. There are stars. Abuelo wakes me before the urge to stay overwhelms me. I am cold and I am light. He hands me the egg. Now take your sins, mijo. Break this egg. Say fuck you, Satan. Fuck your mother, Satan.
I throw the egg before me. I tell Satan to fuck his mother. But there’s no confetti. Inside, it’s all black and gray. Inside, it looks and smells the way I imagine cancer does. Something more viscous than oil. Applause and laughter break out. Everyone was watching. And I’m the rube falling for Abuelo’s tricks. The party gets a second wind. The tío who is bad with money pulls out something dark and aged in wood for the adults—but today, I get to take a draw. I’m told it’s all an act. But it’s so black. And Abuelo isn’t laughing. What happens next? I ask. He looks at the mess we made. Now, he says, now you clean it up.
Vincent Antonio Rendoni is a writer based out of Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in Fiction Southwest, Sky Island Journal, Burrow Press, Atticus Review, and Litro.
