Nothing but Bones

“He’s different—you should know that,” his stepfather admits, his mouth twisting downward. Here, he jerks the wheel, twisting us away from a narrow corner in the heart of Juárez. With every slam of the brakes, we swerve through scattered potholes, passersby, and military cars—their roof-top rifles on constant swivel. To escape each turn in the dust, we have to pitch the car forward to peel out, as if the car, itself, is screaming.

On some level, I already know. Next to me, he adjusts his glasses again, clears his throat. He’s spent the past four hours trying, in some way, to say what he couldn’t—that the why was obvious, but it hadn’t scared him any less. I nod, tightening my knuckles around the passenger’s emergency grip. Alejandro had lost everything one night, in one drive—the trip you are on, now—just a few days after his last thanksgiving in the country: his mother, his siblings, his step-father, a wife. Education? He’d been an empty seat at the only graduation he had been given, after a pandemic had stolen his first chance. Work? The closest he’d gotten were pharmacy tech rotations spent sweeping through emergency rooms with his crash cart, counting pills in handfuls of five.

Would you eat too, after that?

I press my nails into my thighs, watch the landscape change from piñons to palm trees. I watch the way that Mexico, too, had their own rez dogs—not just protectors of the community but taken care of, too, by everyone.

On Golondrinas Street, we round the corner in another screech and wait for his dented, asphalt-colored Civic to appear and, when it does, it feels almost the same—like I could’ve been in his old bedroom, craning my neck from his windowsill, listening for him. When he slips from his car like a shadow cutting through broad daylight, at first, neither of us makes a move. Half, I thought, chancing a break in the squealing traffic. Somehow, there is only half of him.

Standing on opposite sides of Golondrinas, so many images lock into place at once—the way skin will hang on bone, when that is all it has left. How, when people are killed in acts of brutality, they will call out for their mothers—that Alejandro can only reach her, now, by phone. Light as a feather, stiff as a board—that silly party trick that taught bored teenagers the art of floating. How, in the coming days, I jokingly bridal-carry him into the house. How the vanishing of a people can change, but it will always operate in the slow act of starvation.

In that moment, I swallow my instant trigger-reaction at the sight of him—suspend horror in my throat. When he leaves for work and I log into virtual lectures, I call my father and choke on air, feel the drag of my skeleton as it rattles for breath, until I whisper daddy, he is nothing but bones.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.