subjugation that a young girl separated from her parents might likely have undergone. (The original versions of the story do not involve any explicit reference to sexual subjugation.) Moreover, Ito adds the sections about the character Anjuhimeko’s attempt to locate Tennoji, a temple in Osaka that was known for being a refuge for the poor and sick.
Perhaps the most important original addition, however, comes in the ending scene with the yamanba mountain witch. Throughout much folklore, the yamanba has represented a nonconformist who rejects home, work, and family to live in the wilds and follow her own will. In Ito’s poem, the yamanba represents the voice of a powerful, liberated sexual desire ordinarily constrained by patriarchal society. In the scenes when she copulates with the stone pillar, Ito is refashioning the creation myth told in the eighth-century semimythological history of Japan called the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters). According to the Kojiki, the male deity Izanagi and his female partner Izanami descend to earth from the heavens and erect a great pillar. After walking around it, the two have conjugal intercourse for the first time, but this intercourse fails because the female deity Izanami speaks before her male counterpart, thus failing to cede to the “proper” order of things. The result of their union is a malformed “Leech-Child” that they set adrift on the sea. In Ito’s reworking, the yamanba takes her own sexual desire firmly in hand and copulates wildly with the stone pillar. Rather than subjugating her desire to the “proper order of things,” she celebrates it in a way that brings her ecstatic, orgiastic pleasure.
MICHAEL MEJIA. Coyote Takes Us Home
THE TWINS STOWED BENEATH THE SPARE TIRE TELL US A STORY ABOUT a small, square jardin in deep Jalisco with neatly trimmed laurel trees and a cast-iron bandstand where Porfirio Diaz once stood and scratched his balls. Where Pancho Villa farted. Where Lazaro Cardenas spat. Where Vicente Fox picked his teeth. This was the exact spot where Subcomandante Marcos, Tia Chila’s big-balled, black Chihuahua, peed and peed and peed and then mounted little diaperless Natividad. People came running. Nobody had seen a hybrid baby since before the war, since Juan el Oso, whose mother was taken to Acapulco by a circus bear from Leon.
The twins were waiting on the curb, they say, watching the procession of the bloody martyr, when Coyote finally came out of the cantina. The silver scorpion on his belt buckle clacked its claws and made seven blind sisters dance.
“Will you take us?” the twins asked.
Coyote sniffed the air and measured the moon between his thumb and his forefinger. It was more than half full and the twins had had a strange delivery. But Coyote wasn’t concerned. He led them across the bridge and down through the park to the dry creek bed where we were all asleep in the Nova among the stained herons, busted appliances, tires, maricons, and used condoms. A woman was weeping on a television.
“Move over, little ones,” Coyote whispered. “Make room, periquitos.”
A few leaves fall for no reason in this story. And even now we hear the band playing, just as the twins say it is: the trumpets and clarinets spiraling like crazy rockets, exploding into pink sparks above the crowd. This all happened at a time of balloons and marionettes, they say. Is that the engine or the tuba? The transmission or the snare drum? Dust and stones become asphalt. A desert appears at blue sunrise. Some rocks, a red-flowering nopal, a thin horse, a goat.
It’s fine, we say. That sounds like a beginning. We can believe in that. Este era and we’re gone.
In the morning we see some kids throwing rocks at a woman’s head by the side of the road. They ride off on their bikes when we pull over.
“I met a man at a disco,” the head tells us. The head of this woman tells us this man was a rich mestizo’s son, and how she danced a polka with him and lost one of her shabby little huaraches. How he tracked her down and mashed her toes into a plastic slipper he found somewhere and declared he’d marry her. How he shot twins up inside her that night, and how when they were born her stepsisters sold them to some blue-eyed gringos from New Haven. The husband took his revenge by burying her up to her neck.
“Those bitches are drinking champagne up in Polanco now! But they’ll be back for me,” she says. “They’ll be back, my little ones, my little white children.” One of those rocks must’ve knocked something loose. We throw a few more while Coyote trots up the road to hike his leg on a spot where a woman buried the devil caught in a bottle.
“Mis gringitas!” the head cries. “Bring money!”
Pow!
We hear our parents are dragging long sacks through fields of broad-leafed bitter greens that we don’t recognize. They are working in an orchard of small gnarled trees, where children are cultivated with the help of bees. Our parents pluck them heavy from the branches, pinch them off their slender green stems, and redeem bushels of those kids for chits that mean food and cable television. The tractors start up and carry them to Chicago. Our parents work in a factory assembling little pink babies covered in feathers. They’re waiting for us, our parents, stone-faced. They’re laying out our shorts and T-shirts on a firm bunk bed, our parents. Our work clothes.
Coyote says: They found some devils in Arizona, in the desert, mingled in with the bloated corpses of those mojados from Guatemala and Nicaragua and Mexico. They were looking for work, too. It’s not so easy for them either these days, you know.
Coyote says: Those boys, Corrin Corran, Tirin Tiran, Oyin Oyan, Pedin Pedan, Comin Coman, they got themselves locked inside a grain car in Matamoros. Then they sat trapped in a rail yard in Iowa for four months. When they were found, there wasn’t much left.
It’s like Coyote is trying to trap us with his stories. It’s like listening to him read the dictionary. “You can’t trust just nobody,” he says. We hate the frown of his jade driving mask, the deep stare of its shell eyes. If you look too long, you feel heavy. You feel old. So we let him talk, but we don’t listen and we definitely don’t keep still. We watch his words tumble out the open windows, turn to vultures on the road picking over something’s small carcass. “What did you say, Coyote?” we ask. “What was that? What?” until he gets pissed off and stomps harder on the gas, making the Nova buck and fishtail. Anyway, he has hair in his ears.
The boy in the headrest has a sister carved from coral, and the iron girl beneath the backseat was a present to an old man from three blond sissies, lottery winners from Juarez.
Coyote told us to wait in the Nova, but we were hungry. Through the window of her house we could see the Witch of Guamuchil, her tits pounding together like two wet cheeses, Coyote’s teeth clamped to the loose flesh of her withers, his pink skinny prick pumping in and out of her hairy rump. Once we threw some water on two dogs fucking. The girl from Tizapan killed a family pig by shoving a lit candle in its ass. As we crossed the highway, Pilar, Carlos, and Miguel were turned to paper by the touch of a southbound RV. They blew into the Sierra Madres. Adios, muchachitos!
We were in a graveyard, watching our step. When the dead speak, it’s like walking through a spider’s web.
“Who’s there?” they kept asking, but we couldn’t remember our names. There was a lot of dog shit around.
“Don’t marry a woman who can’t keep a secret,” one of them said.
“Don’t keep idle sticks in the house,” said another.
“Don’t shelter orphan children,” called out a third. We wrote it all down with a stick and some sand, like nothing we’d need on the other side.
We found the elotero sitting under a tree, eating the last of his ears of corn. “But we’re hungry,” we said.
