Glass to Sand: A collection of poems and short stories Read online

  “I don’t know. This was the only room they had left. Why does it matter?”

  He didn’t look up from his iPhone as he talked, and he didn’t really care about why it mattered to me or not.

   “Why did you ask me to come here if you’re just going to be on your phone, Jimmy? Why don’t you just go home?”

  This time he sighed and put his phone down slowly on the small glass table. He waited for a few seconds as he studied the cigarette he was crushing in the little green ashtray on the table. I didn’t see his tired brown eyes until he started talking.

  “Rose. We can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.”

  He was fidgeting with his platinum Rolex. He looked over my shoulder at the wooden fence behind me, then at his polished black Ferragamo shoes.

  “Fine.”

  He let go of his wristwatch and looked me straight in the eye, only this time he cocked his head to the right and squinted his eyes.

  “Fine? That’s it? What do you mean fine, Rose? Does that mean anything to you at all? It’s been almost a year since we’ve been seeing each other-“

  “In secret.”

  “Well, yes, in secret. But you know how it is Rose. I have a wife and kids, and a respectable job where people look up to me. I can’t be involved in something so risky. People talk.”

  I looked inside the hotel room and thought how ridiculous it was to rent a room with two beds for two people.

  “So just because I don’t have a wife and kids and I’m young and I work on my paintings from home, that’s not risky for me? You think people don’t talk about me? They say I’m the one who seduced you. I’m the 5’2” vicious girl who forced a grown man to sneak around behind his wife’s back? You don’t have to pretend to care Jimmy. I was never indispensible. I said fine.”

  I grabbed my denim backpack from the floor and started to get up when Jimmy put his warm, rough hands on my cold, nervous wrist.

  “Wait- I’m sorry Rose. You mean everything to me. And I know that it wasn’t easy for you either.”

  I stayed standing up, with my backpack hanging from one shoulder, because that was the only way I would feel bigger. That was the only way he couldn’t make me feel vulnerable again.

  “Jimmy your life never stopped. Your business trips and Disneyland trips and fancy dinner parties with your wife, those never stopped. I was just on the side. The secret toy you keep under your bed and take out when it’s dark and no one’s looking-“

  “Rose it wasn’t like that-“

  I yanked my little wrist from his grip.

  “It was exactly like that, Jimmy.”

  I could feel the sting of tears ready to flood my eyes. But I fought hard, I pretended like I was a man, because men don’t cry.

  “I actually put my life on hold for you Jimmy. I gave up the gallery in San Francisco for you. I gave up my friends and my social life because I dreamed that one day you would tell me to meet you at a house instead of a hotel. And you would tell me that you came clean to your wife and that you couldn’t live without me. 

  I waited for him to stand up and put his head on my shoulder and whisper something, anything that would make me stay with him in the stupid room with two beds.

  “Rose. I’m so sorry. You know it’s just not that easy...”

  He didn’t stand up. He didn’t even try to grab my wrist again or make eye contact. He just put his hands together on his forehead and leaned forward, like he was saying a prayer. He looked pathetic. But I probably looked even more pathetic waiting for him to change his mind. I yanked the delicate silver and sapphire necklace from my neck, the one he’d given me for my birthday a week ago, the one that looked straight from a “He went to Jared’s!”commercial. I hated it. I threw it at the glass table and felt good when it landed precisely in the ashtray, on top of his twelfth cigarette.

  “Don’t ever call me again Jimmy.”

  I turned around before he could look up, before I could get a last look at the tired brown eyes that made me fall for him when we first met. I wanted the last image of him to be the pathetic, church-boy pose he’d chosen moments before.

  Before he could say anything, I had slammed the door and left him in the room, the one with pretentious flowers and a little dirty table and two stupid beds for one selfish man.

  THE SPANISH TOURIST

  Cynthia was one of the best con artists she knew. She admired her own ability to identify the most vulnerable and unsuspecting targets. Mostly, she knew that being an attractive, clean, and charming young woman was the best trap she could possibly have. Her old tricks were starting to bore her, however. The pigeon drop, the lottery fraud by proxy, the badger game, etc. The latter was her least favorite. She didn’t actually like becoming involved with married men to extort them. Not because of the sleazy men, but because of the innocent women back home, dutifully attending their beautiful children. But this had been her most lucrative method yet, and so she awaited the arrival of her next married victim as she sat in the smoothie shack by the beach one summer.

  As she finished her Blueberry Bliss, as if on cue, her next mark walked into the shack. He was rather tall with thick brown hair and hazel eyes. He was alone at the moment, and he looked very confused as he scrolled through his iPhone.

  Definitely a tourist. She smoothed her hair down and quickly checked herself out using the front-camera of her phone.

  “Excuse me, you seem lost, do you need any help?” Standing in front of the man, he seemed in his twenties, about her age, and she had to stop herself from admiring his very striking physique.

  “Ah...Hablas español?” he asked in a soft voice. He seemed to be relieved that someone had approached him.

  Cynthia immediately thought of how to work around the language barrier. Either she thought of something quick, or she would have to abort the mission.  

  “Oh, I’m sorry, muy poquito?” She was able to pull a couple words from her high school days. “I’m Megan. What’s your name?” She spoke slowly as if that would somehow make him understand English.

  “Me-gan,” he repeated, with an awkward emphasis on the ‘gan’. “Soy Javier. I…uh, come from eh-Spain.”

  “Wow! That’s amazing! I’ve heard its very, bonito, over there.”

  “Es bello,” he corrected, “but I like Florida also.”

  Cynthia was still hesitant, but the flashy Rolex and his crisp, $90 Polo were pretty attractive. But she needed more personal details.

  “So, are you, traveling alone?” she asked coyly.

  “Yes unfortunately. But I miss mis niños. The familia, y Triana.”

  Bingo. Triana. The foolish wife. He seemed rather young to have niños, but it didn’t matter. Now that she was asserted about his economic and relationship status, she had to set the hook. She offered him a seat and a smoothie, of which he eagerly accepted the first, and politely insisted on paying for the second.

  “Your smile is- bella,” he whispered shyly at one point. She pretended to blush, figuring he had probably told his wife the same thing many times over, and then offered to show him her favorite part of the beach.

  Once they got to the ocean, she seductively removed her sundress to reveal what she liked to call, ‘the secret weapon bikini’. This had worked every time, on every guy. But Javier didn’t seem as creepily turned on as some of the older business suits she’d had to deal with. He didn’t give her some cheap and vulgar ‘compliment’. He just proceeded to fold his Polo into his backpack and went straight for a dive.

    Maybe he’s gay, she thought. But she didn’t buy it. There was something different about Javier. As he swam, he was so overjoyed and distracted, that he didn’t even notice when she had already dried herself up and slipped her dress back on. It was like watching a little boy at Disney for the first time. Maybe she was going soft. Worst thing that could happen to a con artist like herself was to go soft. But she liked this guy. He was incredibly warm and charming and didn’t let his pride get in t
he way of his emotions. He just let them be.

  After their swim, as the sun was sinking back into the ocean, she remembered a cute little Spanish restaurant where she could get him tipsy enough to invite her back to his place, and it was only about a 15-minute walk down the beach.

  As they walked, he talked half in Spanish and half in broken English, but she understood that he had moved from Spain because his family’s high-end restaurant businesses over there were being closed, and he’d been living in an condo along the beach while he established connections for their relocation to Florida. He felt very lonely, especially because all his family stayed in Spain and as she could tell, his English didn’t make it easy for him to make any friends. Cynthia sympathized with him. As much as she wanted to take advantage of him, she understood what it was like not to have friends. Every person she met knew her by a different name, and when she did go out and spend her ‘payday’ money at the clubs or when she crashed fancy hotel parties, her money made friends. Lots of them. But she never did.

  “This is it, Javier. La Casa de Las Tapas.”

  Javier chuckled at the probably ridiculous name, but he held the door open for her. Before she could sit down, he pulled the chair out for her, something very few men had done in her entire life.

  “Gracias.”

  As they waited, he asked her if she had any friends or family.

  “Actually my family doesn’t talk to me. And my line of work doesn’t really let me have that many friends, really.”

  She didn’t know why she had said that. He now had a reason to be skeptical of her. And a con artist must never, under any circumstance, give their subject a reason to be skeptical.

  “Americanos are very- individuals. Very lonely. In Triana, we are more family-”

  “Wait- in Triana? I’m sorry isn’t that your wife’s name? I’m confused-“

  He laughed deeply, “Triana, that is the place in Sevilla, where I come from.” He laughed again but it was more reassuring than it was ridiculing.

  “So, you’re not married? You said you missed your niños. Your kids?”

  “Oh por Dios! Married! Hijos! I’m only twenty-six! My sister’s children, they’re so sweet,” he replied innocently.

  Cynthia was torn. There was no money to be made here. If there was no wife to work against, then this was simply a normal, healthy relationship. She couldn’t allow it. She would have to go to plan B. The romance scam. But this plan would be flawed, too.

  Once the food arrived, Cynthia felt a little awkward when Javier bowed his head and said a small prayer in which she thought she heard him thank God for meeting a new amiga.

  Great. Now, I’m really going to hell, she thought.

  As they dug in to their thirty-dollar paella, Javier stopped and looked up at her. The restaurant was dark and she couldn’t tell, but she thought she saw his eyes water.

  “Me-gan. Tonight is the best night, in a very long time. I am glad I met you today. It would make me happy, if you, go out with me again, tomorrow.”

  But Cynthia could not accept. If she tried to do the romance scam, she knew it would end up hurting her more than anything, as much she didn’t want to admit it. She had work to do, more vulnerable tourists she could find. A good con artist could never become emotionally attached to her subjects. Never.

  But Megan, on the other hand, could not resist. “I would love to.”

  GLASS TO SAND

  She believed in beauty. She was innocence. Her name was Jasmine and her favorite feeling was the California sun lifting the hairs on her arms and neck after a cool swim.

  She rolled through the streets on a small board, letting her hair tangle and flow behind her.

  She saw a homeless man, dark and barefoot. She imagined a lost love, once, long ago.

  She saw a couple sharing lemonade, avoiding each other’s eyes, staring into tomorrow. She imagined countless broken dishes and a baby that was never born.

  She saw a young girl, under the bridge, offering her salty tears to the salty ocean at her knees. She imagined a past that clung on to her back like a wet t-shirt.

  All Jasmine wanted to do was show the homeless man that he could be loved, again. Show the couple that tomorrow would never come if they didn’t spend today seeing one another. Show the girl that somewhere, someone could make her smile, again.

  But she couldn’t show everyone. And this made her chest feel tight, her hands clench, her mouth dry up. It was like the nightmare that made her sweat at night, the one where she wanted to scream so badly but no sound came out.

  She tried to calm herself down. Tried to think of the times she danced, or drank her favorite milk shake. Tried to think of the times she laughed until her stomach hurt, or spent days idly watching her favorite films in bed.

  But each thought became tainted at once, by something dark, almost accidentally. Like an ink spill on paper, or a carpet, or her favorite white skirt. Blotched, impure, irremediable.

  She remembered how men looked at her when she danced a certain way, with crooked smiles and heavy breaths. How she danced with some of them anyway, and how they seduced her away from dancing because she didn’t know how to say no.

  She remembered how drinking her favorite milk shake made her look at the chunk of fat gathered beneath her bra when she sat or when she looked in the mirror afterward.

  She remembered how she once laughed with people, the same people that made her cry. The same people that made her wish she had never laughed in the first place.

  She remembered how, most of the time, she had idle movie days because she had to. Because her body was stale from acting like her mind was okay. Because her mind was collapsing from anger and sadness, hypocrisy and selfishness, perfection and failure.

  She threw her board, undid her old chucks, and ran and ran. She tumbled across the sand clumsily, falling every few steps because her vision was clouded with hot rage.

  In a moment she wondered what would happen if she where covered in sand from head to toe and the sun moved inches closer to the Earth and she became trapped in a glass mold of herself.

  Out of resentment and impotency, her legs gave in and Jasmine landed on her right cheek at the shoreline. Her present pain of the fall was a joke to the collective pain of her past. She stayed there for a long time, hoping the sun would inch closer to the Earth. It did not.

  Instead, the water inched closer to her. Not to her, but to the shore, as it did any other day, for as long as she could remember how the ocean was. She observed as the current gathered all its strength to reach the shore, and when it finally did, the sand became dark and suffocated. The current retreated not in cowardice but almost in an understanding submission, obedience. But it did not give up. It retreated once more to gather its force and kept trying to reach Jasmine’s face. By now she could see a small line of blood and tears escaping together from her cheekbone to the ocean. Eventually, when the sun had begun moving from left to right in Jasmine’s point of view, the current had gained enough strength. It reached her face, gliding its fingers across her head the way her mother would when she tried to comfort her. The cold salt water whispered in her ear. Get up.

  So Jasmine did just that.

  She got up and turned around. She saw that the crying girl and the homeless man and the troubled couple were all gone. In this time, the people had moved, the sun had moved, the ocean and the sand had moved, even the tiny creatures camouflaged in the sand had moved. But Jasmine had stayed there, basking in her pain and wet discomfort. She didn’t want to be like that anymore. She didn’t want to know what it would be like to become molded into a glass version of herself. She wanted the rhythm of the current. Back and forth, relentless, almost foolish, but ambitious and fulfilled simultaneously.

  And Jasmine became just that.

  ###

  About Kimberly:

  Kimberly was born in Miami, Florida and raised between Los Angeles, California and Miami. Her experiences on both coasts piqued her i
nterests in many different art forms, cultures, and lifestyles. While attaining her Creative Writing for Entertainment BFA at Full Sail University, she has written content for on-air radio talent JoJo Wright and worked an internship at Sony Television Networks and Film Independent for the Los Angeles Film Fest. She is currently working on original content for networks and film. Kimberly is particularly passionate about the millennial generation, equal rights movements, and Latin-American culture.

  Let's connect:

  Website: https://kimberlymarcela.com/

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/kim_marcela4

  Instagram: https://instagram.com/kim_marcela4/

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