Exhibit A: Petition for Dissolution She always wanted to visit Bruges, but we settled for an eight-hour bus ride to San Francisco. She hoped a new pair of lace panties—with a hole in the crotch—would summon our unicorn. The trip led to our first and only threesome with a divorce lawyer who took her time dissecting the insect of our marriage. As she flipped through the pages, I could smell the sebum of her hair calling to me from nights before, when I buried my nose in her hindhead—the tickle of a thousand antennae. We shrunk into a fetal position, like conjoined bananas on the top bunk of her bed. I slid the vibrator ring onto my finger—wide enough to accommodate the girth of the average American penis—and placed it above her panties. Her stifled moans seeped out the back of her head. Exhibit B: Testimony Even though her roommate was a “buen vato,” according to her Tío, she didn’t like the way he fell silent whenever they were alone in the kitchen. She also cleaned the tub after he showered, scrubbing away the constellation of red and green snot rockets the showerhead missed. Aside from the bathroom, they also shared a wall—one she suspected filtered more than sound. Her presence slipped into his ritual, a rhythm she pretended not to feel. She shushed me when I laughed. She kept doing so at any sound originating from me, including when I shifted my weight on the bed or farted. This was the first time I ever elicited an orgasm from her, and there was no box on the forms to memorialize it. The pungent yet fresh signature of that achievement mingled with laws we had promised to follow before an officiant, under the courthouse’s aileron. There was no space in the warmth of the xeroxed sheets to fit the night her pupusas gave me food poisoning—or how she nursed me back to health in her brother’s bed, kissing me only when I closed my mouth and pecked. “Why do you have to make your lips so smoochy?” she said, puckering hers like the sucker of a leech. “I don't know,” I replied, “maybe because that's the way I fucking kiss.” Nowhere to attach a recording of how I denied 30 pieces of silver to deliver this one flesh to its doom, when I refused to take the lawyer’s offer to get me half of the fifteen grand she failed to disclose. We never managed to get pregnant, even by accident. Especially during the one-year period we didn’t have sex, when she spent six months in El Salvador—“just visiting”— and returned with an HPV diagnosis stamped in her passport. I wore my silver wedding band on my right hand and giggled when girls I wished I had the courage to sleep with asked: “Are you married?” We did, however, fuck up my mom’s credit—from the times I called her in Central America for hours at a time. The debt outlasted the marriage. She never told the lawyer how I got over the fact that she lied about being a smoker because “everyone smokes in San Salvador.” Or how I discovered pictures on her computer of her ex grabbing her ass. Then there was the picture in light-sensitive emulsion, her pale hand draped on his naked leg. Why was she touching him like that—her brother’s best friend—that Greek-sculpture inner quadrant, browned by the sun of Semana Santa? Why him? Why his gorgeous, rotisserie-chicken quadricep? But I guess there was no way for me to describe that I never cheated on her— technically. Or how the weight of another woman’s breasts felt lighter in my hands having crushed my own ribs seeing her cry “Please! Don’t leave me!” earlier that same night. Exhibit C: Judgment When her gaze lowered to read the documents, the line of lash mascara forming on the crease of her upper eyelid reminded me of our first date—where we didn’t talk or hug or kiss, but merely allowed our hands to dance like Daphnis et Chloé, ignoring time as we unraveled every single one of our dermatoglyphs. Or how she made me get “miel” at McDonald’s for her pancakes, and I brought her syrup. “No, dundo,” she said, lips barbed with stingers—the kind of laughter she saved for when I landed on the sticky end of my broken Spanish. “I want bee honey, not ‘miel de maple.’” The sweetness, lost in transliteration. I handed her the pen—the latex-free grip, ribbed for her pleasure. And as she signed, I finally saw her dream—how we could, someday, build a home in Santa Tecla—just for a moment, before it all became true.
Jose Oseguera (he/him) is a writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Water Stone, Pinch and Sonora Review.
He is the author of the poetry collections “The Milk of Your Blood” (Kelsay Books, 2021) and And This House Is Only a Nest (Homebound Publications, 2024).
