Read Always Running for Free Online

you.”
    This time I approached with caution. Little good that did me: I stepped into a loop of rope on the ground. He pulled on it and dragged me through the weeds and foxtails, up the splintery fence, and tied it down on his side. I hung upside down, kicking and yelling for what seemed like hours until somebody came and cut me down.
    The house on 105th Street stayed cold. We couldn’t always pay the gas or light bills. When we couldn’t, we used candles. We cleaned up the dishes and the table where we ate without any light, whispering because that’s what people do in the dark.
    We took baths in cold water, and I remember wanting to run out of the bathroom as my mother murmured a shiver of words to comfort me:
    “Así es, así será,” she explained as she dunked me into the frigid bath.
    One night, my parents decided to take us to a restaurant since we had no heat to cook anything with. We drove around for awhile. On Avalon Boulevard we found one of those all-night, ham-eggs-&-coffee places. As we pulled up, I curled up in the seat.
    “No, I don’t want to go in,” I yelled.
    “And why not?” my mother demanded. “Por el amor de Dios, aren’t you hungry?”
    I pointed a finger to a sign on the door. It read: “Come In. Cold Inside.”
    Christmases came with barely a whimper. Once my parents bought a fake aluminum tree, placed some presents beneath it, and woke us up early to open them up. Most of the wrappings, though, had been haphazardly put together because Rano had sneaked into the living room in the middle of the night and torn them open to take a peek. The presents came from a church group which gave out gifts for the poor. It was our first Christmas. That day, I broke the plastic submarine, toy gun and metal car I received. I don’t know why. I suppose in my mind it didn’t seem right to have things that were in working order, unspent.
    My mother worked on and off, primarily as a costurera or cleaning homes or taking care of other people’s children. We sometimes went with her to the houses she cleaned. They were nice, American, white-people homes. I remember one had a swimming pool and a fireplace and a thing called rugs. As Mama swept and scrubbed and vacuumed, we played in the corner, my sisters and I, afraid to touch anything. The odor of these houses was different, full of fragrances, sweet and nauseating. On 105th Street the smells were of fried lard, of beans and car fumes, of factory smoke and home-made brew out of backyard stills. There were chicken smells and goat smells in grassless yards filled with engine parts and wire and wood planks, cracked and sprinkled with rusty nails. These were the familiar aromas: the funky earth, animal and mechanical smells which were absent from the homes my mother cleaned.
    Mama always seemed to be sick. For one thing, she was overweight and suffered from a form of diabetes. She had thyroid problems, bad nerves and high blood pressure. She was still young then in Watts, in her thirties, but she had all these ailments. She didn’t even have teeth; they rotted away many years before. This made her look much older until later when she finally obtained false ones. Despite this she worked all the time, chased after my brother with a belt or a board, and held up the family when almost everything else came apart.
    Heavy blue veins streak across my mother’s legs, some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles. Mama periodically bleeds them to relieve the pain. She carefully cuts the engorged veins with a razor and drains them into a porcelain-like metal pail called a tina. I’m small and all I remember are dreams of blood, me drowning in a red sea, blood on sheets, on the walls, splashing against the white pail in streams out of my mother’s ankle. But they aren’t dreams. It is Mama bleeding—into day, into night. Bleeding a birth of memory: my mother, my blood, by the side of the bed, me on the covers, and her slicing into a black vein and filling