[Associate Editor, Britt Bustos: This essay immediately immerses readers within the color-rich specifics of an overbearing mother, an intergenerational Manhattan apartment, and a persistent grief that permeates every waking moment of life. Dreams, memories, and reality collide in this tenderly intricate and detail-oriented story as Moe asks us to forgive the child we all once were as well as question the spirituality of spaces once occupied.]

You, body exhausted and mind racing, alone on the faded gold couch in her living room. Fourth-floor apartment with decaying steps, more than the occasional cockroach in the kitchen, once there were mice and now there are rats, sometimes centipedes, the landlord took away the claw-foot tub and this, too, becomes a mourning. It is late, witching hour, still time to go before morning rises over Manhattan, yet there are still people awake, screaming, singing, laughing, in the distance are sirens, more laughter. In your ear, soft and warm, a single, loud sigh. 

 

It is unclear if the sigh comes from your mouth or from her ghost. You can imagine her whispering, phantasmas, and el diablo esta aqui. Months after her passing, you mention the hauntings to your mother, and she assures you she blessed the apartment with holy water the week after your grandmother passed away. 

 

“Do you want holy water? I can get you some from the internet but it’s expensive, it’s blessed by the Pope.” 

“I’m fine, thanks,” you tell her, but she’s adamant, you can hear her clicking buttons over the phone. 

 

Your mother tells you it’s unreasonable to think there are ghosts in the apartment, though both of you know the space has held too much blood and death to be devoid, empty. When you were younger, you used to hear them, invisible hands rattling change inside of old pipes, the nightmares about the closet opening into another universe filled with needles, or the time you dreamt the door to your mother’s childhood bedroom opened into a second dimension filled with hazy-gray staircases and pale white light. How about sitting on the hamper, feet on the clawed bathtub, your aunt begging you to stop hurting yourself, when just hours earlier your mother had told you to die in Central Park, does not trauma stick around like glow-in-the-dark star glue, keeping everyone company as you all try, and fail, to sleep? 

 

The evening before the funeral: glittering pines, cold Connecticut, blue soap bars infected from your father’s blisters and wounds [he said he couldn’t call you for six months because he typed up a grant proposal over the course of eight hours, his skin broke out in hives, but you thought he was dead, researching his company until you found out he was still very much alive, receiving multi-million-dollar grants for science], the sky was bright navy, New England all winter long, blustery and bearing storms, threats, nothing like where you’ve been living for almost four years, cozy apartment with amber walls, in a too-small Illinois town, but still, you long for the East Coast. The grass was so bright green you became viridescent, obsessed with the frost flowers growing out of the garden, your father told you over dinner he grew “hundreds of peppers” in the summer, it’s a shame you weren’t around at the time. 

 

Baby, please, enough with wishing you were dead. You were a younger body when you frequented the Manhattan apartment, a body more like mannequin than girl, nonhuman, the time you menstruated for months and bled through the bed, the only reason you went to the hospital was after you could barely walk, anemic, and your grandmother cried. She would have been upset you call yourself the villain in all your stories, if you ever knew how to say villain in Spanish. Two years ago was the last time you saw her in person, your father’s house a pit stop on the way to the Upper West Side, between Amsterdam and Broadway, she was already losing her memory, calling platanos maduros, telling you she couldn’t find rice in the supermarket. 

 

The day of the funeral you buy bagels. There is a line around the corner for the best water bagels in all of New York City. You wear your late grandmother’s coat, a black peacoat with three shining buttons. She doesn’t feel dead. You feel her spirit in the back room of the railroad-style apartment, she’s hiding in the back of the bagel shop smearing cream cheese on your toasted bagel, her eyes lurk in the neon lights, her fingers poke out the sides of a bright red rug coated in olives that reads Deli. She is the small gray cat spinning a greasy almond between its paws. 

 

Back in the apartment your mother is stacking green and pink sugar cookies on plates, wrapping everything in tinfoil. “Is this really the time for bagels?” she asks. “Let go of the grudge against your sister,” you tell her. 

“I don’t hold grudges, it’s a sin,” she replies. 

“Doesn’t God still have a grudge against the devil and that’s why he’s in hell?” you ask. 

 

“Satan’s in hell because he’s a jerk. By the way, don’t tell the rest of your family you’re taking the peacoats.” 

She jabs a nail in your direction. 

 

To her right is your cousin’s door leading to the blue room, which also has two French doors and a fourth door leading into the pink room. The pink room has three doors, the innermost one leading to your grandmother’s old room, then the bathroom. As kids, you used to run from the living room into the bathroom, pricking your feet on discarded sewing needles and half-broken buttons from your grandmother’s days working on Fashion Avenue. Beyond the bathroom is a dining room, a small kitchen, and your great-grandmother’s old room, nick- named “The Vatican” for the child-sized cross [stolen] hanging on the wall. You notice your photo has been taken off the cross, but your sister’s photo and your two cousins’ photos remain. 

* 

The last time you saw your grandmother alive was during winter break, back in 2019. It was your first semester in the doctoral program. You had driven home, twenty-two hours, to work at a restaurant in the hopes of saving money before returning to school. The restaurant is in the same family-owned company as the now extinct first restaurant where you worked for almost a decade. But before you head to work, you must make sure to see your grandmother. 

 

You originally planned on seeing her in summertime, before the move, but you were exhausted, sleeping through the days in a summer sweat, promising her you’d see her the next holiday. It’s not lost on you how little time was left, how few seconds you spent making the decision to avoid New York City, what-if’s a distant rumination in your mind. How were you to know? How did you not know. 

 

You ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, an aide helping with cooking and cleaning. You tore thick strips of turkey and dipped them in soft yellow maduros, snacking on crispy platano disks twice fried in oil. 

 

The stoop is falling apart again. Loose trees buckle between faded skyscrapers, each window reflecting the sky. There are gum stains in the street, heat coiling through subway grates, old men in thick gloves and winter coats selling bundles of roses, each one reminds you of your grandfather, your father, your ex. Someone offers you their phone number on a thick piece of cardstock, you toss it into a green trash bin, thinking briefly of the man you dated who helped you sell your grandmother’s jewelry to make ends meet. There wasn’t any love but it hardly mattered; you were so hungry back then you would have done anything to eat. 

* 

Dentro de la cocina, detrás del refrigerador, hay un cuarto cálido, con flores y fotografías, recuerdos y una gran cruz con los rostros de todos los niños. And in this room behind the kitchen and the stove, beyond where the rats gather in wreaths beneath tables whose surfaces were once coated in flour and egg yolk, there is the room with the stolen cross, your mother and her sister are now arguing with each other on who gets to keep it. No one realizes the cross belongs to the room and the ghosts. Once, when you were younger and your great-grandmother had just passed away, your grandmother awoke to her ghost sitting on the edge of the bed. Her laughter filled the apartment. They shared chismé until your mother, fed up, cracked the door open and told her to quit laughing, Wita had passed on. 

 

The apartment is on the same block as the church. There is a statue of Christ, occasionally missing his hands, his robes coated in beer bottles and snack wrappers. You sit in the pew with your cousins, making jokes, feeling like children again. No one has seen each other since before quarantine. Your cousin has a vendetta against you she still won’t explain. She tells you everyone has been urging her to call you and explain things. She says it takes maturity and patience to be open about these sorts of things. You wonder, what sorts of things? You wonder what you’ve done, but don’t ask. She tells you she doesn’t know if you’re both still cool. Is there something to reclaim? She says, “The shit going on between our moms and grandma, too. I don’t care anymore. But when I was younger, I thought allegiance was necessary.” 

 

You eat at an Italian restaurant after the service. Just minutes ago you ran through Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, eager to find Joan Didion’s ashes, poking fun at each other, admiring the stained-glass windows. Everyone discards their church stickers at the dinner table. Your uncles argue with each other, your aunt fusses and pours everyone water. You drink three cappuccinos and try to pretend you don’t have any trauma. Your cousin has brought her best friend [as a buffer, you think to yourself but don’t share aloud], and you don’t want to make a bad first impression. 

 

Everyone shares stories of the death. Your mother was leaving Manhattan and your aunt was driving towards your grandmother, both daughters in transit. It was a Friday, what your grandmother would call Viernes Para Recordar, after a radio show she obsessed over years ago. 

 

“My friend called me the ‘death receptionist’ because I had to call all the relatives while my mom was driving,” your cousin tells you between bites of cheese and pasta. “They were all saying, ‘¡Ay! No me digas. Okay, me voy a llamar a alguien.’” 

There are still so many stories you don’t know how to share. Your cousin’s best friend tells you people need to go to therapy, even if it makes them bad creative writers, because without therapy they’re hurting each other. You don’t explain you are in therapy, that you use each session as inspiration for your writing. You want to tell her healing is complicated, you would never hurt anyone, you want to push her head into the fresh bread basket the waiter has just brought. Instead, you fold your hands beneath the table, ask for a fourth cappuccino, smile. It is a Friday to remember, you will not cause a scene. 

* 

The two of you bent over the greasy metal counter during pre-meal, listening to the chef rattle off ingredients for the week’s specials. Your cheek, cold, vaguely wet from your grandmother’s tear-filled goodbye. Foam then smoke from a fisherman’s stew. Sweet, red tomato broth, shining and newly cleaned mussels, vague outline of purple and white shells, buttery scallops. Your hand inching towards a thin, crispy bread slice hiding just beyond the other servers’ line of sight. You catch his eye. He raises his eyebrows. Don’t, he mouths. You both know he’s right. Your body won’t handle any more yelling. 

 

The dreams start after you leave your grandmother’s apartment. 

 

In the first dream, you are faced with what appears to be an enormous column of dollhouse parts and toys, frozen in place. This house is always dim, and the lights are creamy. Without warning, the doll-tower sinks into the floor, like a well, and you are somehow responsible for climbing all the way to the bottom. You never make it to the edge, however, and always wake up before you can try. In the next dream you find an alternate world inside of a bedroom mirror. You are a child, giggling as you touch the surface of the mirror; glass ripples like the disrupted surface of a pond. You climb in, and reality disappears. In other dreams, you are back in the Manhattan apartment, your mother is there, the sun is perpetually setting. You try to leave but find you are locked in. The last dream involves your grandparents and great-grandmother. They wear large fur coats and beautiful hats, hats of so many shapes and sizes it’s impossible to recount them all. Each family member has a hand on your body. You don’t know why but you feel they have arrived to grant wishes. 

 

Weeks later you’ll have left again, this time from your childhood home, books stuffed in cars, journals full of stained dupe papers, his goodbye card taped to the inside of a journal. You can see the restaurant on your body. Hot plate burns on your right hand, a thumb bending too far, nights you wake in a new space covered in sweat, faded memories of floors covered in mushrooms and upturned nails. 

You tell yourself these are dreams of love. You remember watching the chefs use their hands to skin beautiful silver fish. You pressed your stomach against all the tables, seduced by maple glaze, waiting, eyes glossed over, loving the curl of carrot as it was peeled again and again, until only the core was left. You are haunted in kitchens you have no attachment to; you dutifully hang garlic above the doorway, high-five a ceramic sculpture of the Last Supper. You cry thinking of your family. That night, you dream of a boardwalk next to a man you are in love with. Before you can tell him, you trip into the water and drown. 

* 

Your mother doesn’t want to have blood or veins in her body. She talks to you while her legs are stretching against the wall, says her vagina is falling out again. 

 

“Are all the things I’m telling you going into some book?” she asks. 

“Maybe,” you reply, toying with your grandmother’s glass elephant sculpture. “Well, I’m telling you all this so you can write it down, you’re the poet. I’m going to write down everything I remember and I’m going to give it to you, and I hope you can help preserve them. You know how to rhyme things.” 

 

You talk about Viernes Para Recordar. Your grandmother leaves on a Friday, and every Friday since then, when you’ve been waiting on news, your mother texts you and says not to forget, Fridays are for remembering, Fridays are special. You know she’s right, but you find your body is exhausted from remembering its history. 

 

These rooms, coated in translucent cobwebs of the past, twist into haunted spaces. You think again of the empty space of doorways and holes, the way air becomes an object and an occurrence, the looseness of bedsheets that might contain ghosts, balls of thread your grandmother used to keep in bins under the bed, how they might help you understand the maze. 

* 

Your cousin calls you the day of your grandmother’s death. She tells you a story about how on New Year’s Eve the year before, late Friday, she crafted a sacrificial altar. She placed tangerines around dollar-store candles, a hundred-dollar bill from your grandmother, she pleaded with the spirits for the apartment. You wonder if you should try to kindle a deal with a god, to ask one for protection or clarity. You’re on the phone for hours, and the doorway shifts into two, the light fraying every space. Outside there is thunder and rain; you think, of course there is. 

 

After you hang up, you’ll tell your partner about what happened, crying only once after he says he’s sorry for your loss. You make plans to head back to the restaurant, then abandon them at the last minute. 

 “You know,” he says, rubbing the small of your back, “you said your soul is going to return to you, but I feel like that’s not true.” He tells you he’s sorry, but part of your soul will always be in a haunted space, like limbo.