Fiction
By Iris Mónica Vargas
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Hi Mom, how are you? Hope you’re ok. There’s one hour’s difference between Puerto Rico and Panama so it’s nine o’clock in the evening here. We’ve just put the baby down in his cot, he cried a couple of times—quite normal at the moment—but it looks like he’s gone to sleep now.
It’s been a long day. He woke up for the last time (oh, he’s crying again) at 6:20 am. Jason got up to him and then they went for a walk to the supermarket. Jason says the supermarket’s really interesting because there’s loads of fruit and other products you just don’t see in the USA. I’ve not been so I don’t know which fruit he’s talking about. All I know is that they call passion fruits maracuyás, not parchas like we do. Jason bought a mango and maracuyá smoothie and on the bottle there was a picture of a mango and a passion fruit so that’s how I know. Anyway, I woke up around half past seven and asked Jason if he’d let me sleep for another hour, so that’s why he and Matias went for a wander—before that, they’d been “playing” in the bedroom’s living room. We’re all in one room with a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom, a mini-office and a little living room. It’s just right for everything we’ve brought. By everything, I mean baby. 🙂
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“You need stop do these things, Yari,” said Jason in his broken Spanish.
“Aha, how do you say it?”
“You need to stop.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Yari shot back, abruptly setting her computer aside to look her husband square in the eyes, a challenging glare.
“What do you think I should do? You tell me, eh? You want to give my mother a patatús?” she said, but Jason didn’t know how to answer. He wasn’t entirely sure what a “patatús” was—his native language was English, not Spanish—but he got the gist of what his wife was getting at and he knew she was right. He ought to look for something to do, as well. That’s why they’d gone on holiday. To clear their heads. He was heartbroken, too, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to survive from now on. He left his wife in the room. It was difficult to breathe; he needed some air. His wife carried on typing. From the balcony, he could hear her fingers furiously hitting the keyboard. She wrote like a madwoman, non-stop. She went to bed very late every night, barely resting. It was true: there was nothing else they could do. Perhaps it was better this way.>>
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