The Weight of Shadows

The Weight of Shadows by José Orduña Page A

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Authors: José Orduña
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    It feels like a sick love affair: a faceless power needing to know my every move, utterance, thought, and behavior even though there’s no reason for me to be under observation or suspicion. It seems my valentine finds me threatening, which reveals more about my valentine than it does about me.
    I hand in the form, and a portly woman with a stern face comes around the corner. She provides an obligatory smile.She positions me in front of a white backdrop and raises a digital camera in front of my face.
    â€œSmile, darling.”
    We walk to what looks like a copy machine except it’s bigger than I am. The woman speaks warmly to me. She puts on a pair of latex gloves, takes my hand, and puts each of my digits on a clear glass grid individually, then together, and then it’s over. She hands me an alcohol wipe and tells me I’ll be receiving another notice as soon as the FBI clears me.
    â€œThat’s it?”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    Ariel: “That’s it?”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    I look at my watch. “Tasty Tacos?”
    My friend Chelsea, a native of Des Moines, made me promise that after the capturing of my biometric data, Ariel and I would eat at Tasty Tacos. She smiled facetiously, displaying her prominent incisors when I agreed.
    â€œStarting with virtually nothing, we have taken a family recipe and given people across the country an opportunity to sample our one-of-a-kind flour taco.” In 1961, the Mosqueda family didn’t imagine they’d own five profitable “fast serve restaurants.” Ariel and I can’t stop smiling at this mongrel food establishment: Formica diner booths and tables; an old-school slide-lettering menu above the cash register that’s faded yellow and spattered with some kind of dried red sauce; a fat, mustachioed man with a long, braided ponytail; a group of three construction workers—one black, one white, one brown—all wearing tan Carhartt jackets. A family of three—a morbidly obese white woman whose lower stomach is dangerously wedged under the table, her racially ambiguous partner, and their even more racially ambiguous child who’s going to town on two corn dogs.
    I look at my red tray, with one hard-shell chicken taco—chicken that feels, between my teeth, to have been boiled—oneshriveled corn dog that tastes thawed from a long deep freeze, and one small cola in a disposable cup with the restaurant’s logo: a young Mexican boy wearing a sombrero with a sarape slung over his left shoulder, his hands extended, in the small reverie of being a man. He exclaims, “Nada Es Imposible!”

CHAPTER 4
La Soledad de Octavio
    To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future.
    â€”Octavio Paz
, The Labyrinth of Solitude
    â€œChhhht, cabrón.” Octavio swats at my head because we’re three cans of Tecate in, and I’ve forgotten to speak quietly again. He lives in a small, single-family home with his wife, her mother, his brother-in-law, his brother-in-law’s wife, their infant son, and his wife’s widowed cousin. One overweight Yorkie named Cookie yips incessantly while looking out the window, and another one, an emaciated, seventeen-year-old male named Coco, bumbles about in a diaper, drooling, until he finds himself in a corner and freezes, at which point someone turns him around so he can get stuck in another corner. In a small office past the kitchen, an African grey parrot sleeps standing on his perch.
    I’m home for the weekend, visiting from graduate school in Iowa, which feels like being stuck in a tiny aquarium that never gets cleaned. The displeasure of being perpetually surrounded by graduate students and academics gets to be unbearable, and cooking meals for one and eating them ina silent apartment shaves away at the psyche. I’ve recently taken to setting my laptop across from me while

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