Alejandra studied the photographs on the wall of the lobby – sepia tones of dark-colored laborers and White masters dressed in early 1900s attire working on rubber, cacao and sugar cane plantations. She felt nervous but lucky, she finally had the energy to get out of the basement where she was staying, and go to an interview. The receptionist called her into an office with a tall blond man with glasses and a well-trimmed beard. 

“Your English is quite good. Where did you learn it?” he asked.

“My father.”

“I would have guessed you learned it in school.”

Alejandra explained that her family came from the oil fields of Venezuela and the only way to get ahead in the camps was to speak English. So, from an early age, they all practiced at home. 

He asked for her passport. Alejandra handed it to him.  

“You only have a tourist visa.” He handed her passport back. “I wish you’d have said so before. We have warehouses with hundreds of workers. We can’t take a chance with anyone that does not have proper papers.” 

She was dismissed. A few minutes later, she stood outside in the sticky hundred-degree Atlanta heat and humidity surrounded by industrial warehouses with no windows. The GPS of her phone gave her a location where she could take public transportation back to Doña Teresa’s house in the suburbs. Alejandra walked along perfectly manicured lawns with flower beds and cherry blossoms. A car honked, startling her as a wave of wind blew past her. She could not understand why a country so advanced did not have any sidewalks. Didn’t people walk in this country? She arrived at a bus stop where she waited for forty-five minutes. The bus took her closer to downtown, where she took the subway to the end of the northbound station, but still, she had a good twenty miles to get to the house. She felt frustrated and called one of the boys who lived in Doña Teresa’s basement and gave her the ride there. He told her that he was already at the restaurant where he worked, so maybe she should call the house. When she called the landline at Doña Teresa’s, Mr. Forrest, her husband, responded and volunteered to pick her up.

*

“Hello, young lady,” Mr. Forrest said, as he arrived at the curb of the subway station driving a muddy F-150 truck. “So, you are one of the people camping out on the couches in the basement?”

She nodded.

“I’m so sorry about all that is going on in your country. It must be hard.”

She nodded again.

“Mama Teresa is doing all she can to help you kids. But we’ve run out of room. I’m sure once one of the other kids finds their own place, you can get yourself a room, maybe with one of the other ladies.”

Alejandra nodded again. As they pulled out of the station into the highway, she noticed the five-story-high pillars where the tracks ended.

“Why does it end right there? Why didn’t they finish it, take it up to the suburbs? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Hahaha. Great observation.”

Alejandra nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Forrest, for picking me up.”

“Just call me Forrest. You know why it stops right there? Wanna know the truth?”

There was a pause, and Alejandra looked at the old man with his white beard, dress slacks and starched shirt with no tie. She was just making conversation to vent her frustration of not finding any work. She terribly missed Venezuela. But this place felt safer, so she nodded.

“Segregation,” Forrest continued, taking a pause.

“Didn’t that end a long time ago?”  Alejandra said, now curious.

“Not really. It just went underground. This highway was built to cut through all the Black neighborhoods and slums, and if you were north of I-20 you were in a White neighborhood, and south you were in the hood. And every time a Black family bought in a White neighborhood, all the other White people moved out – panicking. The Great White Flight. So, they moved to the suburbs. The moment people wanted to expand public transportation up to the suburbs and other towns they said, hell no. You’re not going to bring all that crime, all those drugs, all those ‘other’ people over here. So, they stopped the subway. Thirty years later, we still have a crappy transportation system and segregated neighborhoods.”

Alejandra looked outside, at the traffic, at all the cars going up to the suburbs, no different than she would have seen in Caracas, a much bigger city, with much bigger problems. Did she make the right decision to come to this country? It took her six months of depression to simply grasp what had happened to her. But it didn’t matter. If anything, she felt better. She was going to find a job, even though her passport visa had expired and now she was going to be one of those called ‘illegal.’ Going back was out of the question. The idea filled her with fear and anxiety, to the point of almost passing out. She was moving forward, no matter what. This was her new reality.

*

Doña Teresa’s basement was like a refugee camp for displaced Venezuelans. The first one to arrive was her grown daughter, Ana Maria. Then Ana Maria’s children with their own kids and friends came up. Soon their friends needed a place to stay. Like Alejandra, many had left Venezuela with no idea what would happen next, with simply the clothes on their backs and a suitcase. Alejandra found herself there because Ana Maria was friends with her cousin, the one who bought her the plane ticket, but her cousin and husband could not keep Alejandra in their small one-bedroom apartment, and now they had a baby – an anchor baby.

The basement was a maze of corridors with several living areas, a TV and a couch and doors that led to different bedrooms. At the end, there was a larger room with its own entrance that used to be rented for extra money – now Ana Maria’s bedroom. Ana Maria took pity on Alejandra’s situation – sleeping on a couch at her cousin’s small apartment with the baby crying all the time and offered another couch to sleep on, but at least a little more private – tucked in a corner. They would spend some time together looking at pictures of blue guacamayas perched on the balcony rails of Caracas. Whenever the photos included the Avila mountains with the small toupee of a white cloud on top of it, Alejandra hyperventilated. How could something once so endearing now feel so wrong? What was happening to her?

“You can tell me what happened,” Ana Maria suggested many times. But Alejandra would not talk. She had not even told her own mother what had happened with the guard at the hospital. The only one that had an idea of what occurred to her was her brother’s girlfriend. One of the guards, a National Policeman, had confiscated the medicines, anesthesia, and tools for her mother’s surgery and demanded astronomical amounts of money if she wanted them back, or else. ‘Else’ with a wink – a very difficult memory to verbalize even though the events replayed in her head over and over.

Alejandra had a miscarriage a few months after arriving in Atlanta. Ana Maria helped her deal with it, and every time she asked about what happened, she was faced with a morose expression and a dead stare as if saying, “Don’t you ever go there again.”

Ana Maria was into tarot cards, plants and herbs that cured ailments or got rid of bad spirits. She kept candles and incense lit all the time on her mantel and had crystals and stones that absorbed bad energy. 

Many times, they would sit on the veranda of Doña Teresa’s house and drink herbal teas. Ana Maria’s sons and some of the other Venezuelans would sit with them and smoke cigarettes and talk about who got out and who didn’t. What projects they got on to make money. Sometimes they cleaned houses, worked on demolition teams for a remodeling company, or painted some of the vacant slum apartments for Mr. Forrest. They commented there were so many Venezuelans arriving in the States that an arepera restaurant had recently opened and the lady who made the empanadas was an MD who still had a practice in a small town close to Cumana.

One day, a couple of Mormon missionaries came to the steps and indicated that they were invited to dinner by Doña Teresa. When they arrived on the veranda with their bright smiles, white shirts, simple ties and name tags, they eyed Alejandra and asked her how long she had been in America.

She did not respond.

Ana Maria smiled and ignored them.

They asked Alejandra again, “How long have you been in America?”

“All my life,” Alejandra responded bluntly.

“No, seriously. You have an accent, so where are you from?”

“I’m from Caracas, Venezuela and yes, I have been in America ALL my life.”

She found their question annoying so she got up and went down to the basement. She tried to recall how they officially referred to gringos down in Venezuela and remembered the newspapers using the word Estadounidence, butnever American. This was not the first time she had been asked how long she had been in America, but in the past, she didn’t know what to say and had drawn a blank. Next time she would tell them. Where she came from had been America several centuries before the United States could even take claim to the name. And the man from which the name came, Amerigo Vespucci, never visited or wrote about the lands north of the Caribbean Sea but wrote about the houses on the water, the palafitos of Lake Maracaibo. They reminded him of a little Venice, thus naming a whole country Venezuela.

“Are you okay?” Ana Maria asked.

“I’m good,” Alejandra responded, cocooned inside the blankets on her couch.

To Alejandra, Mi América had an accent, and it was more representative of the sentiment of the Statue of Liberty, inclusive and arms open to all immigrants escaping some type of oppression, regardless of race, religion, or which country they were from, not just White, Christians from Europe. 

*

Forrest offered Alejandra a way to make some money. She was so excited about it that the next time the boys were sitting out on the veranda, listening to music and smoking cigarettes, she mentioned it to them.

They looked at her with apprehension.

“He still owes me about seven hundred dollars,” one of them responded.

“Yeah, he’ll find some excuse not to pay you.”

“Or he will pay you half and tell you that he will have your money only after some other project is finished.”

“And then, some other excuse will come up.”

It didn’t matter. Alejandra felt guilty that she had been in their basement for six months, eating their food, washing her clothes with their detergent and water, and had not paid a single cent, so she wanted to pay them back for what they had done for her. She accepted the offer. Forrest could tell the workers what to do in English, she would interpret to Spanish then help with the cleanup of the site. 

She went with Forrest early one morning to a part of town with abandoned houses, trash on the streets, boarded-up windows. They arrived at a small red brick complex with three rows of apartments. A construction board stood at the entrance of one of the buildings with papers, permits and signatures.

“Say hello to Juan,” Forrest said to Alejandra as they met a short dark man with an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. 

“Cómo está, Patrón?” Juan responded.

Four other men walked around the site, but they were not introduced. As Forrest mentioned throughout the morning, they all worked for Juan. Juan had papers or maybe a fake social, but the other men more than likely were illegal. And Forrest indicated that was not his business. They did good work. There were a lot of drugs and drunkenness in the construction business, so he had stopped hiring locals because they were either unreliable or they wanted way too much money. These men worked hard, did not complain, and used their money to either send home to their families or eat tacos al pastor and listen to rancheras instead of buying meth.

The crew were prying up the floorboards of one of the apartments when Juan called Alejandra.

“Esta todo podrido.”

Alejandra interpreted: “It’s all rotten.”

The more they pulled out, the more rotten beams they found. Some of the crew hammered the walls and removed the white stucco, revealing the lath that was used before drywall was invented. When Alejandra was not translating, she moved debris out and placed it in a large metal container. She noticed the other apartments around with their small grills to the side, old or rusting playground equipment, trash, and practically no grass in most of the areas.

One of the workers came to Alejandra and asked her to go in. She followed the man to an area where some pipes ran underneath the beams.

“Dígale al Señor Forrest que tenemos un problema,” Juan said, pointing at some areas. “Asbestos.”

“You don’t have to translate that. Fudge. Fudge me!” Forrest responded leaning down. “Everyone, get out. Get out!”

“Lo podemos limpiar, pero con cuidado,” Juan said.

“No. The last time we didn’t follow the rules, I got fined out the ass.” He looked at Alejandra. “I should have known better. You see all these places? They were built a long time ago for poor people. You see the walls. It’s all lead paint. Builders back then didn’t give a hoot, even though they knew. We’re going to have to bring a special crew. Tell everyone, out.”

They had to go buy a special tape that said asbestos and place it all around the site. Then they drove back home.

Alejandra could not help but ask, how come he knew so much about so many different things.

“Before being a slumlord,” Forrest started with a sly grin, “I was an attorney. More than anything an idealist, dreaming of good causes. I marched in Selma. But I had to make money. So, before it was called flipping houses, I began to remodel and do some development. Along the way, I found a lot of these properties that I could get for practically nothing, thinking I could fix them and turn them around. Well, guess what? They are inside the redline. That means I had to fix them on my own dime because the banks would not loan any money in these areas. You know why? They are Black neighborhoods. I was flipping a lot of houses when the real estate bubble happened and the market crashed. I lost a shitload. Had to sell some of my better properties. Those properties have been gentrified since then. I could have made a lot of money. Instead, I’m stuck with this. It is what it is. So I’m sorry, now I’m a slumlord. Go figure.”

Alejandra smiled.

“Slum? If you on saw some of the slums in Caracas, it makes this look middle class.”

*

Alejandra went to a Mexican carnicería with Ana Maria and Doña Teresa. The two women were so different. Whatever one woman liked, the other one didn’t. But it felt like it was a game they had since they would acquiesce to what the other wanted and place it in the cart.

“Back home, this would be an abasto, but here, they call them carnicerias,” Ana Maria said. 

They went to a particular counter with vitamins and all kinds of pills. Ana Maria ordered several types. The lady pulled them from the back. Doña Teresa gave Ana Maria a wry look.

“Don’t pooh-pooh me, Mamá!” Ana Maria said. “You have your good insurance, your Medicare. You can get your meds and all that. I don’t. I have no papers. These are Mexican antibiotics. They work.”

While the two women bickered, Alejandra remembered how it was back home. How, to have her mother’s surgery, she had to go through the black market for the medicines, antibiotics, morphine and even the sterilized tools, since the hospitals no longer cleaned anything. Then she had to deal with how a guard stole her meds. Why did her brain go there? Why? Why? Why?

She smelled his rancid breath above her shoulder. Felt the pushing, the shoving. Her heart pounded in her ears, losing her breath, feeling dizzy, shivering. She covered her head with her hands and couldn’t control it and began to sob. She saw his face, smelled his cigarettes and coffee breath. It was overwhelming. Go away. Go away. Go away. Don’t. She crouched, rolled to the ground and held herself in a fetal position, holding tight, clenching her fist. 

Ana Maria rushed down and placed her hand on Alejandra’s head, while Doña Teresa stared at them with a blank expression on her face.

“Should we call an ambulance?” Doña Teresa asked.

“Panic attack,” Ana Maria responded.

“I’ve never had one of those. I’m strong. It’s all in your head. I think if people keep their minds positive, you can overcome anything. What happened to her?”

“Por favor, Mamá! We all have stories.”

Alejandra’s face was tight, sobbing, holding, jerking every now and then as if wanting to pull away from something.

“Time will tell, Mamá.”

That night Ana Maria invited Alejandra to her room. They checked the news from Venezuela through social media. Ana Maria talked about the time she went back to fix her visa, which she thought would take a month. Instead she spent almost a year, going from line to line trying to find basic foods. They shared their view of the blue guacamayas, how they used to land on Ana Maria’s balcony, eight to fifteen of them, and hang out. She also told her how one time, happy that she was able to get toilet paper at the market, she got mugged at gunpoint. Ana Maria was silent after that. Alejandra did not elaborate.

“I know something really bad happened to you. You want to get it out?”

Alejandra’s eyes watered. She shook her head. They hugged and cried and lit incense and drank tea. 

* 

Alejandra continued to work for Forrest as an interpreter, going to different properties, where they changed a stove, or fixed a toilet, then spent the rest of the day at the site that had the asbestos abatement problem. For a while crews wearing what looked like plastic space suits moved around removing stuff. Forrest gave Alejandra fifty dollars and said he had not expected the asbestos issue, but the moment that got resolved and more money came in, he would pay her for all her time. After they completely rebuilt the apartments, a crew of women came to vacuum and clean up the mess the construction crews had left behind. There she met Sol – a bouncy, cheerful woman from Colombia who managed a cleaning service and had crews that did residential cleaning and hotels.

“You want to make some extra money?” Sol asked Alejandra. Sol explained that most of the big hotels did not have or could not afford the crews needed to clean up rooms, particularly after a big convention. Those rooms were not available until they had been cleaned and the sheets changed. The bulk of the work was done by immigrants, most of them without papers. The hotels could not hire them directly, since the government would fine them, so they gladly used contractors to do the vetting, managing, and payment of such force. They started after the evening rush hour, worked throughout the night, and finished before the sun came up in the morning.

“So you’re going to steal my best assistant from me?” Forrest commented to Sol with a grin. Alejandra gave them a look of surprise and apprehension. “Don’t worry, kid. Go make some money. Whenever you have free time, you can work for me. Once we rent the new units, I will be able to pay you.”

*

Sol came to pick Alejandra up around seven in the evening with a minivan full of women.  They went downtown where the big convention hotels were located. The crew had to move the rooms fast, but during the convention season, it was rather difficult because many of the rooms were a total mess. They had their share of discarded filled condoms, partly dried puke, broken glasses and empty bottles. Alejandra didn’t mind working on the upper floors, some of the rooms were two stories high with a grand piano and a stunning night view of the city. The lights reminded her of Caracas, yet it didn’t send her into a panic attack but gave her a rather soothing feeling that she had to snap out of or fall behind.

For the first time, she was able to send money to her mother, pay for her insulin, and other bills. It was amazing what a difference even five dollars could make. However, the news from Venezuela was even grimmer, more desperate as if a choke were being tightened around the whole country. It particularly shook her to hear that the American embassy was being closed. If anyone now wanted to come to the States, they would have to travel by bus to the border and cross by foot to Colombia.

The crew would arrive at the hotels while there was still music playing around some of the different lobbies and floors, people going up and down all decked out in their suits and cocktail dresses. As the night progressed and they moved from room to room pushing the cart with fresh towels, little bars of soap, and shampoo, they ran across people laughing, half-way drunk, kissing by a door. Sometimes it took them all night to finish. They could see the sunrise from some of the higher floors, bright reds and yellow following the streaks of some cloud, like a fiber optic filament.

While the money was good, cleaning hotel rooms all night was taking a toll on Alejandra. She felt like a zombie. She could not sleep properly even when she cocooned herself in blankets on her corner couch. During the day, voices and the steps of people walking on the floors above reverberated around. By the time she was supposed to wake up and be fresh, she was exhausted. 

Their main client was the cigarette-shaped skyscraper hotel that offered breathtaking views of the city. This property was challenging because their guests, enjoying whatever special occasion that brought them there to the magnificent views, tended to have sex against the wall-to-wall glass windows. Alejandra had to spend additional time with Windex removing the smeared makeup and lipstick, the shapes of body parts smudged on to the glass, or the occasional squirts of other body fluids. This was the case when Sol came into the room with her cell phone to her ear and told them that they were having an emergency and she was contacting all her crews at the three hotels downtown.

“Margarita has been arrested,” she whispered to Alejandra. “I’m calling Omar – my attorney. He knows I have these crazy hours. Oh, my, what a job you got with that window.”

They continued to work different rooms throughout the night as information trickled in. At one point, Sol looked at them with dread.

“Where am I going to get fifteen hundred dollars? Carajo.”

Sol talked to the crews and they decided to stop all work and meet at a Waffle House and see how much money they could pool together for Margarita. Alejandra pitched in with a hundred and fifty that she was going to send to her mother. Down in Venezuela that would have had the value of ten grand US dollars, yet it was important to help their coworker.  

The different crews, all wearing black pants and light pink shirts with the company logo, sat around the Waffle House drinking coffee. Omar arrived in an SUV, parked and joined them. He was a tall, corpulent Black man, dressed in a suit, starched white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie.

Everyone started asking questions. What happened? Where? Why?

“Not all counties and cities in the metro area believe in sanctuaries. In fact, some have clearly said that they don’t. And she just happened to be driving through one of these precincts, where they profiled her.”

Omar went on to explain what happened, but the crew didn’t understand English, so Alejandra interpreted for them.

Margarita was driving her car with her four and six-year-old kids when the cops passed and profiled her. They arrested her because they claimed her driver’s license and other documents were fake. However, they could not leave the kids in the car. She was afraid to call her husband, since he was illegal, so she called Sol. Sol called her husband who was a naturalized citizen, to pick up the kids. 

Omar collected the money, gave Sol a hug and left.

On her way home, Alejandra was exhausted, playing in her head images of the Guardia Nacional in their riot gear, or when they targeted students who had participated in demonstrations and surrounded them with motorcycles and after kicking them to the ground took them in for “questioning.” She took deep breaths trying to calm down. By contrast here in the States, everything seemed so civil, so good, yet what she was realizing was that underneath the surface – it looked more like a police state.

She felt the panic attack come over her, the anxiety, the chills, the choke in her throat and a desire to cry, but tears could not come out. She took deep breaths. Why did she come to the States? Why not a different country? Did she make the right choice? 

“Are you okay?” Sol asked Alejandra while driving, noticing her morose expression.

*

One night they had finished early and left at 3:30 am and headed back to the suburbs. Sol talked about how the following week it was going to be the Chicken Convention and that would bring the loudest, biggest spenders of all the conventions so they would make the biggest mess. All of a sudden, blue lights illuminated the vehicle.

“Here we go again. I need to put this van in my name, instead of Felipe. I hate how they profile you.”

The officer came to the window. Sol offered her driver’s license and registration. The officer asked where she was from. 

“I’m an American citizen. The green card, which by the way is not green, they take that away when you become a citizen.”

The officer asked what they were doing this late out on the street.  

“Working. But not the type of work you think. We clean all those hotel rooms that bring all that money into this great city.”

The police officer went back to his car and after a few minutes came back and asked for the IDs of the other people in the car. A shortness of breath hit Alejandra, realizing that she did not have her passport with her and may get taken in. She wanted to disappear between the other women.

“I’m afraid you cannot ask that. It’s the law. They are not driving and you do not have any probable cause and I know my rights. So, can you please tell me what exactly I was doing for you to stop me?”

Sol fluttered her eyelashes and gave the police officer a big smile. A few minutes later Sol and her crew were back on the road. Alejandra felt relieved, amazed as to how Sol treated the police officer. Sol took the opportunity to explain the difference between a normal cop and an ICE cop. Never ever let an ICE cop in your door. Sometimes, the two worked together, and other times, they did not. The further up they went into the suburbs the more hostile they were towards immigrants and anyone who looked darker or like an undocumented person. 

“Welcome to Forsyth County,” Sol said sometimes driving home, seeing the blue lights stopping other cars on the road.

*

Alejandra struggled, sleeping during the day while on the floor above the basement boards squeaked. She covered the light that filtered through her blanket on her couch. By late afternoon she woke up and tried her pre-work routine. She felt like one of those zombies that she saw in a movie. Was she better off here than living down in Venezuela under the dictatorship with no access to food or medicines and basic things like toilet paper?

They all met inside a Waffle House for coffee when the conversation gravitated towards what had happened to Margarita. The money they collected had paid for her bail for a traffic violation for driving with a fake ID, but the day after she had been released, ICE came over, arrested her, and took her children.

“Cómo es posible?” one of the Salvadoran women exclaimed, out of breath, turning red.

“You see those images on TV of kids with the aluminum foil blankets,” one of them said in Spanish. “They may as well be her kids.”

“Or our kids!”

“Omar has been looking into where they have taken the children, but they are not telling.”

A man having coffee in a booth behind Alejandra turned around and screamed at them. “Speak English! No Spanish here, you people. This is America, so English. I bet you are all illegals.”

They exchanged looks, trying to ignore the man screaming at them. 

The Black waitress across the counter interjected.

“Excuse me, sir, please do not talk like that to the customers in this establishment.”

“You’re going to defend them? They are the fucking illegals. Go back to your country. Go back to that miserable shit-hole you came from.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, or I will call the police,” the Black waitress said emphatically.

“Go ahead, call the police, tell them to bring a paddy wagon for all these illegals.”

“Vámonos,” Sol said to the crew. She threw some money on the table and told everyone to get up and go.

Alejandra got up, noticed the spit on the man’s lip, the unshaven hairs on his face and neck, his eyes, the dirtiness of his jacket, the mud on the man’s boots. She couldn’t breathe, felt a lump in her throat.  Overwhelmed with shivers, she fell to the ground. The crew came to her aid.

“See what you’ve done? You don’t even know what this poor child has been through,” Sol screamed back at the man as they all went outside, got into the vans and drove away.  

    *

Alejandra slept inside the womb of her blanket on the corner couch, in the hallway of the basement, in a warm house. She was safe from the cold, safe from being robbed or raped, safe from the Guardia Nacional, but she was all alone in a different country. She remembered all the homeless children who lived around Caracas. How terrifying it was to scavenge garbage bins of different establishments for a morsel of half-rotten food to eat and being so hungry that she had to overcome nausea from the smell of decomposing food.

Why? Why was the world this way? Why they treated her that way here? Down in Venezuela, the gringos never tried to learn the customs. She grew up having to learn English because the Americans controlled the oil business and even though it was not their country they dictated everything. They wanted you to learn English and they made no effort to speak Spanish. Half the violence that drowned Central and South America was the direct or indirect result of what the United States had done over there. And now that these people wanted to come to the land of opportunity, where all men were supposed to be equal, they’d realized that they were not even considered human. They were instead a thing.

They.

The thought reverberated in her head. They. Alejandra wished she was in Venezuela, but not because she wanted to be back. There was no safety there. But simply because she lived on the ninth floor from which she could jump into the abyss and end it all. There would be nothing but air beneath her feet.

She rocked herself back and forth, day and night. People came by and asked her if she was going to go to work. Like a turtle, she slightly uncovered her head and glared at them, then shook her head. Ana Maria told her that she needed to eat, and again she skook her head and went under the blankets.

The demonstrations she used to go to played vividly in her head. The roar of the masses wanting freedom from the dictatorship echoed. Her boyfriend’s face bouncing against hers with a kiss. Yes, she used to have a boyfriend. How much she had loved him, but had to let him go. She couldn’t tell him. He would never accept her. She was too ashamed of what… she allowed. How she couldn’t tell him the truth. The incident played in her head, the guard at the hospital where they had attended her mother. That pungent putrid smell – sweat, coffee, cigarettes – was carved into her consciousness, the same smell of the man screaming at them at the Waffle House. Why didn’t she stop him? Her mom got her medicines. Her surgery was done, the pain was controlled, there were no infections. She couldn’t call it rape, when she had not stopped him. Yet she felt like nothing. She felt insignificant – Podrida.

Alejandra barely ate. She slept withdrawn in her cocoon of blankets. Images of the incident repeated in her head, but now she also saw the face of the man at the Waffle House screaming at her filled with hate and vitriol, spit flying in slow motion into the air.  

Several days later, Alejandra went up to the refrigerator to get something to drink. Forrest was making coffee and noticed how skinny she was.

“My goodness, young lady. You need to eat something. You’re withering away.”

She smiled at him, kept gazing into the fridge, and then closed it.

“Have a cup of coffee. When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know.”

He poured a cup of coffee and gave it to her.

“You should eat something. Want some eggs?”

“No thank you. I just can’t. It’s… Too much inside me I can’t let go.”

“You could try me.”

Alejandra looked at the old man with his white hair and whiskers, slightly stooped back, and pleasant, unassuming smile. She closed the refrigerator. She tried not to spill the cup of coffee now in her hand, so she moved towards the kitchen table and sat.

“When I was in Venezuela, we went to a lot of demonstrations. We got shot by the National Guard and the National Police. We carried shields and flags and energy and love. We had a just cause. It didn’t matter that they hit us many times with the plastic bullets, or tear gas. We wanted freedom and democracy.”

Forrest sat next to her and looked intently at her eyes.

“My then-boyfriend got shot in the knee and had to be taken to Houston so he would not lose his leg. Then I…”

Alejandra clenched her teeth and turned her face to the side.

“What happened?”

“I have not been able to tell anyone. I felt… so dirty. I allowed it. It was all my fault. I could have stopped it, but then my mom would not have her meds and she would not have been able to have her surgery. She would be…”

Alejandra paused and pursed her lips while mucus came down from her nose and tears rolled down her cheek.

“I was…” 

Forrest grabbed a paper napkin and gave it to her. She blew her nose.

Before she could say what she wanted to say, she began to sob. Forrest leaned forward and gave her a hug. 

“It’s going to be all right,” he whispered to her.

She wept for a while then leaned back, looking away at the window.

“The thing is. No matter what happened to us in the streets, to me, I always felt like I was a good person, a good daughter, a good citizen. But now, after what happened in the Waffle House, I feel like now I am the bad person, the evil alien, taking away from others. Am I a bad person?”

Forrest took a sip from his coffee.

“Look, kiddo. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my day. Some, I thought I was doing good and in retrospect, I realize it was bad. So, don’t feel bad about yourself. You are what keeps this country fresh. You’re not the problem but the solution. Sure, there are a lot of injustices in this country. But here you have a chance to fight about it and create change. Someday you will look back and realize how much stronger you are because of all of it.”

Alejandra noticed the steam on the coffee, took a sip, pulled back and looked around.

“Sugar?” Forrest asked.

“That would be nice.”