Throne by Jessica Palomo

Lena down the street is a veterana of la mala vida. Sitting on her front porch and laughing a smoker’s laugh you can count the gold teeth in the back of her mouth on the days she feels like speaking to you.

Forty years ago she was eight months pregnant and by herself when she moved into the dusty house down the street. Grandma always said it wasn’t her fault for living la mala vida when life had been bad right back to her.

The morning she went to prison again I was in my crisp school uniform, watching from the living room window as fifteen men in riot gear silently approached her front porch. The moon hadn’t faded from the sky yet. I’d never seen men approach with caution, so quiet and so aware.

She’s like a man, my grandma would say while gossiping with aunts, exchanging stories, dishing looks. If I stayed quiet they would forget I was there and talk about her girlfriend who left this neighborhood before you or I even had eyes. I’d forget to swallow my saliva when they’d talk about the bedroom window that was always open in the summer and the things they saw in the middle of the night.

When I come back home for the winter she is still there on her porch, sitting as though the paint-chipped chair is made of gold, her chin up and out, smoking and watching people walk by. Everyone says hi to Lena as they walk by, including me — as if we are kissing the foot of the Virgen Maria in church. On Lena’s porch there is no man, just a gun and pack of cigarettes. In my old age I will have a throne made of gold like Lena does, and they will kiss my feet as if I am the Virgen Maria too.

Jessica Palomo is a UC Berkeley Emerging Writer’s Institute Alum and a graduate of Syracuse University, where her work was selected for the Writing Program’s Nonfiction Series in 2014. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.