Thanks for tuning in to Latinx Lit Audio Mag; I’m your host, Teresa Douglas. And Welcome to the third part of our three-part Perfect Pairings Episodes; these episodes are my way of pulling back the curtain, if you will, so you can hear these pieces the way I do—in groups that play off of each other.

This week’s theme is So Funny It hurts. Carlos Greaves’ 10 Types of Vicks Vapo Rub Your Abuela Keeps Around the House is straight comedy. Also, it’s a little healing because I thought my Abuela was the only one who put Vicks on you if she thought you looked a little off.

Abram Valdez’s piece, The Facilities are for Mourners Only, mixes humor with sadness to tell an ultimately hopeful story of a family healing while grieving.

The Latinx diaspora encompasses a multitude of cultures and histories, but we are united in the way we use joy and humor to dance our way through the many phases of life. These pieces are great examples of this. Enjoy!

This story originally appeared in Flexx Mag

10 Types of Vicks VapoRub Your Abuela Keeps Around the House

by Carlos Greaves

Vicks VapoRub is a staple of any Latin American household. Made by Procter and Gamble, it’s been around for 115 years, and your abuela has been using it for at least 90 of those years. Here are the 10 varieties of Vicks your abuela definitely keeps somewhere around the house.

1. Regular Vicks

   This is your standard Vicks VapoRub. It cures most upper respiratory illnesses, and probably the lower respiratory illnesses too. Your abuela definitely has a jar of this variety. Probably two.

2. Nose Vicks

   In addition to regular Vicks, your abuela has an extra jar of Vicks specifically for rubbing all up under your nose whenever you have a really bad cold even though the label clearly says not to do this. Your nostrils will feel like they’re on fire, and you’ll smell nothing but menthol for 4 days, but sure enough, your cold will disappear. Could it have just been your immune system doing its job? Maybe. Your abuela is convinced it was the Nose Vicks.

3. “Por si acaso” Vicks

   This is the Vicks that your abuela rubs on you because, even though you’re not sick, you are looking a little pale, so it’s best to just rub some on for good measure. She will then tell you that you also need to get some sun. Or bathe in salt water. Probably both.

4. “Sana sana colita de rana” Vicks

   This is the jar of Vicks your abuela keeps specifically for applying to bumps, bruises, and scrapes. You have no idea whether it’s safe to apply Vicks to an open wound, but it’s your abuela, so you don’t question it. And hey, you’ve survived up to this point, so it can’t be bad, right?

5. Scented Candles Vicks

   Your abuela rubs this jar of Vicks on candles to make her entire house smell like Vicks. If you can barely survive in a house reeking of menthol, then the germs definitely won’t be able to, so the thinking goes. You don’t dare question this flawless logic. By the way, remember the open wound she put Vicks on earlier? It’s not looking too great.

6. “Ese gato maldito” Vicks

   This is the Vicks your abuela uses to try to keep the cat from scratching the furniture. It is the only Vicks that doesn’t work, because even your abuela can’t stop a cat from doing what a cat wants to do.

7. “Ese perro maldito” Vicks

   Unlike the Gato Maldito Vicks, this Vicks was highly effective in getting the dog to stop misbehaving. You don’t know what she did, or where she put that Vicks. All you know is that your dog does not misbehave around your abuela anymore. In fact, your dog looks like it’s seen some shit. Your abuela can be very scary sometimes.

8. “Mal de ojo” Vicks

   This is the Vicks that protects you from mal de ojo. Duh.

9. Curandera Vicks

   Statistically speaking, your abuela is the neighborhood curandera, or healer, so she keeps a jar of Vicks that’s specially suited for curing your neighbors’ various maladies. She infuses this Vicks with witch hazel aka agua maravilla, and it cures all manner of afflictions from hemorrhoids to a broken heart.

10. Holy Vicks

    The Rolls-Royce of Vicks. This is the Vicks that your abuela somehow convinced the Pope to bless when she went to the Vatican, and It. Cures. Everything. But you better have cash on hand because your abuela isn’t about to give away her Holy Vicks for free. Also, your open wound got severely infected. Better pony up the dough.

The Facilities Are for Mourners Only

by Abram Valdez

Gloria marvelled at her mother Teresa’s courage at the precession of mourners but girded herself as Jesse Reina recalled a story of a recent bout with diarrhea. Two days after Gloria’s father Roberto passed, every tangled branch of the family tree and even the rotten pieces of family bark visited Teresa and Gloria. Many brought cards or flowers, and almost everyone paying their respects brought food with their condolences because grieving is easier when you don’t have to cook. But in the visits and plates—the tamales, the papas, the molé, the fried chicken—none of the bereaved brought a dish with a side-story about the runs.

“It was that diner in Hobbs,” Jesse said to his wife Victoria. “‘Fins & Hens.’ I think that was the name. I had this chicken fried steak meal, and I was doing good for a while, but then, oh baby, I had to get to a commode in Albuquerque. I sat on the toilet so long, my legs fell asleep.”

For Jesse, to go from “I was surprised to learn about Roberto’s stroke” to “I got familiar with the all the toilets and some bushes between New Mexico and Arizona” was paint by numbers, and he was in mid-masterpiece—a real Boboso Ross.

“I don’t mean to get gross, but I just couldn’t keep anything down inside.”

Gloria tried to find a break in Jesse’s bathroom chronicles to aid Teresa. Her sainted mother who 48 hours removed from losing her husband of thirty years was trying to entertain someone she hadn’t talked to in 10 years. Jesse wasn’t familia familia, but he grew up in the same church that Teresa and Roberto attended for twenty years. They had known Jesse when he was messing his papers, so he was family, even if he was still having trouble with his bathroom business.

“I thought I was going to get dehydrated. I didn’t know where all that soupy stuff was coming from. So I would eat some crackers and drink Gatorade, and nombre! Back to the potty.”

“You okay, a’ma?” Gloria asked.

“Yes, mija,” Teresa replied and slightly rolled her eyes at Gloria before Jesse jumped right back into his story, certain everyone was on the edge of every toilet seat with him.

“It got so bad, I had to see a doctor in Colorado. He wanted to put me on an IV, but I didn’t want to ruin the trip, so I toughed it out. Just kinda squeezed, you know.”

Jesse came to this story by way of asking, “Did Roberto ever get a second opinion?”

Gloria relayed to him about a doctor in New Mexico that Roberto had been in contact with, and Jesse was off to the cuartito.

Outside of that, that brief mention about her dad and New Mexico, Gloria hadn’t had time to think about her father in any other way. She was at the hospital. Then, she was making arrangements. Then, the calls and the visitors. Insurance. Bereavement paperwork. What else was there after all of it? But every time she felt the walls squeezing in, her mother seemed to do something that she didn’t expect of a widow. The day after Roberto passed, Teresa took in a movie by herself—The Incredibles Part 2—and didn’t invite Gloria. Teresa skipped out on choosing a casket to try ramen for the first time with her prima Sandy. If Teresa was in mourning, Gloria couldn’t tell from the pair of Jordans she bought for herself. It wasn’t that there was an avoidance of grief as much as there was also grief. Still, Gloria could only marvel at Teresa’s ability to nod and smile at this ridiculous man.

“Twelve pounds! I lost twelve pounds! Had to buy new clothes for the trip back. Partly because of all the weight I lost, but also… I didn’t quite make it to the little boy’s room in Winslow, Arizona, if you get me. New shoes, too.”

The little boys room was the phrase that did it. Gloria was ready to lay into Jesse. She went over it in her head: What the hell is wrong with you? No one wants to hear about your leaky butthole. We’re in mourning, pendejo! Say ‘sorry for your loss’ and be on your way, guey.    

That’s when she saw Teresa digging her pinky fingernail into her thumb. At first, it looked like she was trying to stay awake, but Teresa drew blood. A small red spot started to reveal itself as if it was unraveling more than gushing. Jesse was elbows deep into a description about emptying the contents of his guts into four different states until the only thing he had left inside was a whistle, when Teresa put her bloody thumb to her nose.

“Oh, my,” she said, feigning an ache. “My nose! Mija, can you help me?”  She rubbed her thumb against her nose.

“Excuse me, Jesse, I…,” Teresa said. “Con permiso.”

Jesse and Victoria both stood. Teresa tilted her head back, waved Gloria over, and headed for her bedroom. She put her hands out like she was lost and relying on the walls to guide her away.

At the door to her room, she was quick to the cut. “Get that cochino out of the house.” She took a tissue to wipe her thumb clean. “And don’t let him use the bathroom.”

When Gloria returned to the living room, Victoria was still standing.

“Is your mom okay?” Victoria asked.

“Just a long day. I’m gonna let her rest.”

“Jesse had to excuse himself. Sorry about him. He talks too much. I think he’s nervous. He’s never had anyone he knows pass.”

Gloria and Victoria stood, looking for something to say to each other. What else was there to talk about? His foot fungus or hair plugs? As a part of Teresa’s church family, Gloria was certain they would see each other again at the service, but what to say in the now? That led her down the path of she could share with them in a few days. And that led to what would she share with everyone else at the service?

Then, Jesse appeared from the guest bathroom, and she was almost relieved to see him.

“We’ll be on our way. We want to let Teresa rest,” he said. “You, too. We just wanted to say we’re really sorry about your dad. He was such a sweet guy to us. Please, call us if you or your mom need anything.”

Jesse nodded and Victoria joined him by the door. As they exited, Jesse cupped Gloria’s hands between his. “Dios la bendiga.”

As Jesse and Victoria walked to their car, Gloria stood in the screen door and adjusted the door’s mourning wreath. For the past three days, the house felt like it was shaking, rumbling, like it was echoing the feeling of Gloria’s stomach jumping to her chest. But now it all seemed to be leaving with Jesse and Victoria. All Gloria could feel was a settling as she waved them away. She thought about going for a walk. Maybe buying a pair of Jordans, too. Gloria could feel her breath finally leaving her body like a promise freed from beneath a paperweight. So many things to do next, but the most important? She would rush to the bathroom to wash her hands. Of Jesse. Of her dad. Of all of it.

Welcome to Latinx Lit audio Mag. I’m your host, Teresa Douglas. Today is the second of our 3 story pairings episodes, where you get the opportunity to listen to two pieces that share commonalities. Last week’s episode was all about hidden history.

This week’s theme is celestial motherhood. Adrian Ernesto Cepeda’s poem Starry Starry Light is an Ode to his mother’s love of Van Gough’s famous painting. Nancy Zigler’s fictional story Museums in the Sky tackles space, grief, and healing from the loss of a mother.

These two stories were the ones, if I’m being perfectly honest, that sparked the idea of story pairings, because you get to listen to them the way I do. And it’s a little different experience listening to two pieces playing off of each other. I know you’re going to love them.

(Transition music)

Starry, Starry Light

by Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

“Every star may be a sun to someone.”

― Carl Sagan

Every time you would take

us to el mueso when mis

hermanos and I would run

off, muchas horas despues

we would find you with

headphone Walkman in

your ears escuchando

your favorite Don McLean

cancion, on repeat, standing

in front of the one piece

you would gaze, mirandolo

contemplating the palates

parado frente a la obra de

arte, in love con la noche

en el lienzo, the peaks

curling above el pueblo,

imaginando todos en la

cuidad dormiendo while

sus ojos focus amazed

at the glowing estrellas

amarillas beaming circulos

so many waves of azules

swimming en el cielo sky.

I wish haberte preguntado

what made this Van Gogh

piece su pintura favorita.

I imagine the colors like

Vincent’s brushstrokes

would instantly reflect

like olas in the sky and

ripple your secreto sadness

in waves. Instead of kneeling

in church, the museum became

one of your most devoted

sacred espacios, sus ojos

no longer watching Dios,

the only hymn you live

to oir, concentrating on

this starry night, with your

eyes gleaming, los colores

would sing to you— no

longer trieste listening

always picturing paradise,

focusing on your favorite masterpiece

seeing you, Don McLean

in your ears siempre serenading…

Mami’s eyes always resounding

with the brightest of blues

glimmering vida colors of delight.

(transition music)

Museums in the Sky

by Nancy Zigler

            My name is Cielo Salas, and I am writing to say that I am not sorry. You were a twenty-one-year-old philosophy major, and I was a twenty-seven-year-old grad school dropout. The professor had fallen ill, and the English department had let me sub in exchange for $3,333 dollars.

First day of teaching, you jotted down your phone number next to your name on my seating chart. The number also contained a series of threes. The letters were angular, confident. The mark of your pen almost ripped through the thin sheet before you.

I didn’t call right away, but I did begin to take each comma personally. You wrote about a town where it rained each day for six years. You wrote about a couple who existed in different dimensions of outer space. They kept falling in love over and over again until they woke up as each other. You wrote about how the universe was a hologram, and that we were all just shitty reflections of our invisible selves.

In Spanish, the word for deep space is espacio profundo. Isn’t that lovely?

My mom, Alma, named me Cielo so that I could feel limitless. Personally, I would have preferred she named me Black Hole or Aurora Borealis because I’ve always been drawn to the blankness of the night. She’s the one that liked space, not me, but since she’s been gone, all I’ve been looking for are signs and symbols that she did walk this earth alongside me.

**

It snowed winter to spring. I spent a lot of time not grading. Or not doing much of anything, if I’m being honest. Online, I found recordings of you from high school, back when you were a junior tennis all-star. I tried to decode the interviews, imagine what you ate for lunch that day. Repeating the words in my head: drop shot, tuna sandwich, number two fade. If we had been high school classmates, you would have been the hot guy who didn’t give me a second thought. I had flowered in later adulthood—like the universe had given us a chance to meet in the middle.

Boy, you could write the shit out of a sentence. Many of your pieces took place inside the same Moscow kitchen. Your characters smoked too much and never spoke in dialogue, then, the twist—how in the dusk, the velvet curtains painted the tile floors pink and it made you want to cry. I’d close my eyes to imagine the satiny wallpaper patterned with ostriches cracking out of gray shells.

By the time the snow had melted, I finally dialed your number. We went ice-skating in Schenley Park, and you made lazy figure eights as if you were born to do it.

“My parents were ice skaters,” you explained simply.

My mother is dead, I wanted to say. Instead, I cupped your hand in mine and we listened to the softness of snow falling off of cedars.

**

By the time the frost had melted off of crocuses, we finally had our movie moment in the laundry room of my apartment. Wedged in between two machines, I felt a darkness in me slowly spreading, rising and falling like a sine wave. A blurry phone number was written on the palm of your hand, the one you used to pull my hair back before it slipped through your fingers.

The dryer beeped. Wrapped in a hot fleece blanket, we exited the laundry room like two children on Christmas Eve. As we made it to the third floor, the lights flickered on: one, two, three, four. My door was unlocked, the windows wide open to let in the mystery and magic of Pittsburgh at midnight.

You took in my studio apartment thoughtfully, green eyes darting corner to corner, where I had color-coded all my things into artful nests on the floor with gaping holes in between.

“What, you moved in like, yesterday?”

“I’m still figuring out the feng shui.”

“It feels so temporary.”

You tilted my chin towards your face and counted my freckles. My curandera told me I got them from staring too hard at the moon after my mother died. Your hands on my face were the most intimate I had ever known. They traced over the grease burns on my wrists, which I got from working the fryer at Taco Bell in high school.

“Hey, have you eaten?” you asked.

“I haven’t gone grocery shopping. Since I moved in.”

You slid next to me on the floor, in a nest where everything was purple. “Well, tonight you are very lucky,” you said. “You’re having one perfect plum.”

You held the invisible fruit up to the naked bulb of my living room. We both admired it and you whispered stories of its deliciousness into my ear. I drifted off to sleep against the black nest, mostly made up of the contents of my heart.

Before you left, you looked out the window and into the empty parking lot across the street. There was a single star in the sky. I remembered that my mom had once said that the space station belonged in a museum of dreams that should not exist. I wondered if you had a beyond place too.

**

I’m on a train to Pittsburgh. Tree shadows carve rivets in my mother’s face, one with wide and familiar green eyes. An old ache consumes me.

We talk about what heaven looks like. She tells me that she doesn’t know. I’m alarmed until she says that it’s better not to know everything. She sounds wise, and I marvel at what I do not know. We talk about surrealism, space-time, the stargazing gene in corn snakes.

As the sky fades to black, I realize that we are the only ones here, the sky a mess of red planets.

This phantasm ages with me. In sleep, it’s the only place I don’t feel suspended in time.

**

In my class, we repeated the word rhododendron over and over, as if we could glimpse the word before it took off, like a swan in flight. After, we tried a few more: strumpet, sunchoke, synesthesia. I had forty more minutes to fill. So, we took turns reading Andre Breton’s poems out loud.

“Madam.” You paused to look at me hard. “A pair of silk stockings.”

I didn’t hear the tail end of the poem.

Did you know that Venetia Burney, an eleven-year old, gave Pluto its name? After the Roman god of the underworld, with the peculiar talent of making himself invisible.

I ended class early and my students filed out of the classroom. You didn’t wait for them to leave as you stood over me, gripping the sides of my podium in a way that felt familiar. Rogue planets are not attached to any star.

“You teach us about writing,” you said, opening the door as if to leave. “What about living your truth?”

My truth was that I was actually a reluctant astrophysicist moonlighting as a writing teacher. My mother had died the year I was supposed to defend my thesis, so I said no thanks and dropped out of school. Then I crawled into myself and never came out.

You gave me your stories. I gave you your grades. You gave me your coat. I gave you my hand. Gemini. Pisces. Moscow. Texas.

I’ve beat my brains out over it: how did our stars align? What did we have to offer each other other than refuge? We were two meteors shining past each other, lighting the other’s path.

**

A renowned physicist once told me that most life events are due to chance. People thread the stories of their lives together because life is not nothing.

Once, when I was about your age, I tried to understand string theory by holding my pen up to the light. A dot, a line, a cube. I reached this nirvana—dimensions begged to be understood. I knew the fourth dimension would bite me in the ass one day, the spin that becomes more than a sum of its parts.

**

My last week of teaching, I got drunk with a saxophone player with kind eyes. After I grasped his collar and told him about your intonations in the words silk stockings, I ended up alone in a jazz club downtown. Gathering my purse, I began to head east, towards a bench that was not a bus stop. Murphy’s law, I stumbled headfirst into you.

You snapped my keys out of my hand and said a quick goodbye to the redhead from our class. After I got into your car, you sped down the icy freeway with animal grace. I could make out your fine lines drawn against the night. We drove through a tunnel carved through a mountain. Your car was littered with gym socks, beef jerky, and R&B cassette tapes. The music blasted through the speakers.

“I’m from Philly,” you said.

“I can tell.”

“Everybody knows about us.”

“Yes.” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Their stories have a lot of May-Decembers.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“I’ll deal with the dean later,” I said, not mentioning that I had put in my notice of resignation that morning. I wouldn’t get the last $333 dollars, we had agreed.

“Did you like my story?” You smiled, the lights of the tunnel whirring past, making your pupils seem deeper.

“I liked the scene with the herring in a fur coat,” I said. “What, in Russia all you ate were little salads?”

“If you live in Russia you better like mayonnaise,” you said. “And never-ending winter.”

“Like Narnia,” I said.

We came out the other end holding our breaths. If you know Pittsburgh, you’ll know the tunnel—when you’re submerged in the belly of the beast and then the skyline knocks you out cold. That night, it was one for the books.

You felt indestructible to me in that moment, among your mess and faded R&B.

Beyond the skyline and city limits was your home. I had imagined you above something ordinary like living in an apartment. I was dying to see your kitchen. Once you unlocked the door and we went inside, I was sobered by the mattress on the floor, a grease-speckled window, peeling red walls.

“You look about 1000 years old,” you said.

You looked so young.

“And you’re a Halley’s comet,” I said, leaning into your chest. You came into my life like a prayer. A blip later, and you’d be gone.

In that dim apartment, it dawned on me that my life was unspectacular. In my museum of dreams, the ghost of my mother followed me close. That black hole October when she died blew me right open like a kite and ended with a lifetime of me waiting for the train to come.

**

I ran into you many many years later, beneath a bridge with a highway rattling above us. The story that we told ourselves about each other a bold blot on the horizon. What came to me at that moment was the last story of yours that I ever read. You said to the woman with no food at her apartment: “inevitably, your skin was my autobiography.”

You were older now. Perhaps you never knew me, yet you traced the grease mark on my wrist before saying goodbye, and I felt a pang in my heart. The ice had melted, and spring had arrived.

“Godammit,” I said into the wind, thumbing my mittens against the railing. “We never could see each other clearly.”

The train passed overhead, and you were already gone. I have a fourth dimension, I wanted to shout after you. It’s pure as light, as sound, as song. Maybe I’ll write that on my gravestone. Grief, love, relative spacetime—it’s not linear. Back then, I had nothing to offer you except my sadness.

And maybe I am sorry. We write so that we can be seen, and because life is not nothing. That morning, the sun rose before a brilliant purple sky. I noticed when you turned away that your eyes were blue. I went to put flowers on my mother’s grave and buy a couch, a telescope, a tiny salad.

When I finally made it home, I frantically looked for my book on Andre Breton. Page 3.

“Madam,” I whispered. “A pair of silk stockings.”

I turned the page.

“Is not a leap into the void.”

Welcome to Latinx lit Audio Mag. I’m your host, Teresa Douglas. And today, we’re going to do something a little bit different. Normally on the mag we feature one story per episode. But I discovered in the course of producing these episodes that certain themes started recurring. Love, Death. Family. Grandparents.

It sounds like the Latinx version of The Princess Bride. Chases! Escapes! True Love! But the only way for you, dear listener, to really hear these themes is if you get to listen to these stories the way I do—in groups. Or pairings, if you will. So for the next three episodes I will bring you two pieces that share commonalities.

This week we’re going to listen to two stories that share the theme of hidden history. In Julieta Corpus’ otherworldly poem The Midwife, we travel back to Mexico in the 60’s, when midwives were an integral part of village life. In Camila Santos’ fictional short story It’s Just Dancing, we enter the world of the Taxi Dancer, a person paid to dance with you at a club.

Ready? Let’s begin.