Today’s Monday, my body feels like pine resin and my soul tastes like bad lunch meat. I’ve been sitting in front of this screen for about four hours. I haven’t even gotten up to pee even though I’m full of coffee ‘cause the boss is a jerk. I’ve only been here for two weeks and I have to walk by his stupid office to get to the bathroom and I feel like my skirt is far too short. All the judging eyes who work here are already grandmothers and never wear short skirts. I’d been lead to think that working in an office would be like working at the Daily Planet with Clark Kent—you know, sixty stories up, the view’s nothing but blue skies and many other tall buildings out the windows, which really, are the walls. Also, you would imagine cute men in nerdy glasses, with superhero bodies underneath well-tailored wool suits. Not here, in a little brown cubicle in Santa Fe. There are no guys my age here and I can’t even see any windows. Even if I could, out those windows are more windows of more people staring at more screens. No sky. Santa Fe has the greatest skies. The clouds can make you sick if you look too hard. They’re so freakishly defined. When I am allowed outside for a lunch break, I can’t even look at them; my eyes burn from natural light reflecting on concrete. Plus, I have to concentrate on not getting slaughtered by lunchtime traffic when I’m crossing Saint Francis. Then I go to Subway, where I choose from all these different meats and cheeses that look good in the ads but have the texture of cold, wet rubber. The vegetables are wilted and taste exploited. I have to eat as fast as possible, so I can go back and sit still for a few more hours.
     Yet, an hour later, I still smell like a sandwich. My job is processing files. So I do, for awhile. But my heart’s racing and I don’t know why, so I spin in my chair for a few minutes and then I give my fingernails shitty French tips with whiteout. It’s easier, now that corrective fluid is absorbed onto neat square sponge tips, rather than being chalky and clumped around an acrylic brush. It’s about four-thirty, and I really need a candy bar if I’m gonna live any longer. Luckily, the vending machine is the opposite direction from the supervisor’s office, so I buy like, four snickers bars and walk, as slow as possible, back to my workstation. By now, my manicure’s mostly scratched off and there are updates to be installed on my desktop, so I click the “Install” button and then continue to spin, chew, listen to the light clacking of keys and the light smoker’s cough of Bonita, the Texan grandma in the next cube.
     Then it’s 4:55, so I put my jacket on. Then it’s 4:56 and I slowly put the remainder of my last Snickers bar in my backpack. Then it’s 4:57 and I accidentally click “Restart” instead of “Shut Down.” I spin in my chair some more and watch everyone leave while I wait for the computer to restart. So many pairs of khaki legs swish by. So many people nod and give me empty-eyed goodbyes. So many, that I forget to even leave. I am hypnotized by the smell of carpet and the overwhelming buzz of the florescent lights. Sometimes I get a little nauseous when I think of all my organs and my veins being violated, buzzing with the electricity pumping through the walls and floors.
     I say goodnight to the little cleaning lady when I leave the building. She’s mopping the entrance where one of my careless coworkers spilled an entire medium Dr. Pepper and neglected to clean it up. The syrup is dull from being stepped on with the dusty bottoms of dress shoes. The little cleaning lady smiles and nods as I push the doors open, letting a sampling of a cool breeze blow through the smell of bleach.
     The sun’s going down and the parking lot’s empty. Even the people who ride the train are far away, mingling and shouting into cell phones on the platform. I unchain my road bike, it’s the light pink one with black bullhorn handlebars, the only one that’s left on the rack. I’ve already missed the bus, and I don’t feel like waiting forty-five minutes for the next one.
     Summer’s coming, but at the moment, it’s a little cold. I climb on the bike, wish
again that my skirt wasn’t so short. I cruise through the parking lot, turn left onto
Cordova. I feel braver than usual today. I think it’s because all I do is sit in the same brown cubical day after day.
     Stop light, in the lane to turn onto Cerillos. The cemetery across the street is shining with orange light from the sun starting to think about going down. I know it’s gonna be cold and dark when I get home, but at the moment, I can’t care. The light switches to green and all the traffic that has accumulated roars at once and I feel that if I don’t start pedaling furiously, I’ll be fattened. I cruise into the bike lane, which is bigger than it looks. It’s distracting, trying to keep my pace while Norteño, hip hop, shitty radio rock and Cumbia fly out from partially open windows. A couple drivers honk at my short skirt. The coolness of the approaching evening picks at my legs. Still, I try to pedal with my back and arms straight like women do in Beijing, but the pedaling is intense and the traffic is fast and the hill is steeper than I expected and by the time I see the salvation of Baca street, I’m overwhelmed.
     I swoop right, keeping my tires unnecessarily close to the curb and I roll down the hill, where I feel more comfortable because I don’t feel like I’m going to be killed. I turn left on a street I’ve never seen and run into a dead end somewhere behind the Indian School. I jump off my bike, leaving it in the grass while I sit on the crumbling concrete wall that reinforces the old acequia, even though no one irrigates any more. I pull out a candy bar and I sit there, heart and head and thighs throbbing, pondering a peanut suspended in time against caramel. Before I can take a bite, I hear rustling behind me, coming from the ditch. I smell something like a wet dog and I just want to eat this last couple bites so I can get back on my bike and figure out a less dangerous route home.
     The crunching of dead leaves and rocks continues. The sun is getting closer to the horizon and I can still hear that walker and his nasty smelling dog coming up behind me, but my legs are shaking a little and my breath is a little shallow, so I just wait for him to pass. I decide that if he tells me hello, I’ll wave politely in response.
     Just as I turn my back again, I hear the footsteps come up right behind me. There’s sniffing. And the smell is no longer musty, but putrid. I turn. There’s a woman, maybe age thirty, pretty young, her black hair terribly greasy and tangled and her fuchsia windbreaker wadded and wrinkled and ripped. Her mascara’s running and there is a streak of mud down her face. She’s crying really hard. I can’t move.
     “Oh my God, have you seen any kids playing around here? A boy and a girl…” She begins to cry harder and through her running tears and snot she wavers, “The boy’s 9 and the girl’s 6…” The rest of her sentence dissolve into blubbering.
     My eyes are re-focusing in the quickly fading light. This is one of those moments when as a human, we’re supposed to care for our fellow brothers and sisters, but something about that damn windbreaker throws me off. It’s old looking, a fuchsia windbreaker with neon green and black triangles appliquéd on. Someone her age wouldn’t be wearing such a thing, maybe… maybe she’s homeless.
     “Oh… okay, ma’am. Um… have you called the police? They’ll send out an amber alert. You know, when kids are missing, that’s what they do.” She continues to cry. I dig in my purse. “Here! Use my cell phone.”
      I hold it out to her clumsily, pathetically. She cries harder, opens her arms and steps closer to me. Her smell is of rotting plants, rotting meat, old tires, cabbage cooking, body odor, cleaning products, but mostly her smell reminds me of the one time I went hunting with my dad. She smells like deer entrails. Her face is twisted, deformed, decomposing.
     “¡AIIII! ¡MIS NIÑOS! ¡AIIII!”
     My grandmother and my aunt always told me to stay away from the river, the
ditches, the arroyos, and the acequias at night. La Llorona would be out there, looking for the bodies of her children after drowning them in the Rio Santa Fe over two hundred years ago. But I thought it was stupid, just a story to scare the kids. It’s the 21st century and magic and ghosts and witches and all that, it doesn’t… it can’t exist.
     Llorona’s hands grip my shoulders. She digs her long, long dead woman’s
fingernails into my skin. I want to cry. I want to scream. I want to pick up my bicycle and ride up Cerillos. I want to be over- caffeinated at the office. I want to eat Snickers bars and smashed Subway sandwiches. I want to be bored, just one more time.
     Then again, as I look down at the expensive pink bike and the candy bar wrapper blowing and tumbling into the weeds, as I look at the intensely mangled flesh lying on the ground wrapped in the deteriorating fuchsia jacket, as the final seconds of the sun end, an overwhelming sadness triggers in the back of my throat. It moves across my chest, into my veins, into my limbs, into my thoughts, into my being. I want nothing more than to find my children, to tell them that I’ve been wrong this whole time.