~
The Third Trip
The first time, she travels like a fugitive: cuts her hair in a bleak half-bath, takes a surly passport photo, and books a ticket 1,000 miles west of where everyone thinks she’ll be.
There’s little glamor beyond the fact of its being Mexico.
#
The second trip, she slogs her way along the coast, past women lugging babies like knapsacks, lumbering at odd angles. Women hunched over the crosswalk at shoulderless intersections, oblivious to their own girth. Women imbalanced with age, protruding in places that seem to surprise even them.
She imagines pride and envy as roommates, sharing clothes.
She gets it, why rich people travel, this closing of the world in one’s fist.
#
The third trip, after her mother dies, is Christmas Eve. She and León buy a bottle of mezcal called 400 Conejos, a good name for a mezcal but a terrifying image. That many rabbits. That many of anything.
Outside the window is an orange tree, and as the scent drifts up from the coast, it is at once purity and rot, paradise and the symptom of a stroke. The succulent, gluttonous menu of a thousand unlived selves.
~
A. J. Bermudez is an award-winning writer and director who divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, the LGBT Toronto Film Festival, Sundance, and in a number of literary journals, including McSweeney’s, The Masters Review, Story, Chicago Review, Fiction International, Boulevard, and elsewhere. She is a former boxer and EMT, a recipient of the Diverse Voices Award, and winner of the 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.