Heat rose and attacked his knuckles. Luis simply let it burn.

He drained the rest of the pot in the colander, the unappetizing root coming into clear view. He hated boiled yuca but never had the heart to say anything. It was tradition. 

Even though the nursing staff didn’t allow Tía to cook for herself anymore, they looked the other way whenever Luis visited. Normally his adoptive aunt would have slapped Luis with a wooden spoon if he tried to help, but she’d forgotten about the food. Now the root was a nasty yellow. Overboiled and mealy.

“Tía, it’s done,” Luis said.

He left the slop to settle in the sink and went into the living room. Kneeling down, he stroked the back of Tía’s freckled hand. She was lost in the TV show, her eyes glazed over, but she wasn’t gone completely. A glimmer of sanity remained. 

She’d been vibrant and colorful when Luis was younger; these days, her mind was overcast with heavy clouds. The doctors couldn’t explain what was going on, happy to accept payment for apathetic shrugs.  

A bit of spit hung down on the side of Tía’s lip. Luis wiped it off with the towel he kept tucked under his belt for such purposes. Some wetness always dribbled on his jeans, but they were ripped and in desperate need of washing anyway. A little spit would be the most harmless of the stains.

He looked around the room, searching for something convincing that might snap her back to reality. Tía jumped right to the supernatural when it came to ailments, and even though Luis knew that stuff was all nonsense, she wouldn’t budge about her superstitions. 

Crosses of every size hung about the apartment. Aloe vera plants decorated with red ribbons squatted next to statues of old Mayan Gods. Charms dangled from multicolored thumbtacks. Several exotic bowls were kept filled with sweetgrass, sage, cedar, tobacco, and lots of little gemstones were scattered between it all, supposed to be doing this and that with negative energy. Luis worried what even greater nonsense Tía might have bought into if she’d ever had disposable income. 

He grabbed the nearest ridiculous candle of some patron saint and lit it, all the while keeping his back to the thing in the room he couldn’t stand the most: a horrible ceramic mask hanging over the couch. It had a human face with its mouth wide, an ugly demon emerging. The human face didn’t look like it was in pain. It looked relieved. Ecstatic. Tía called it the Mask of Quetzalcoatl. Luis called it an ugly piece of shit. 

“Tía,” he said, bringing the candle into her eye-line. “The yuca is done.”

She continued to stare at the television. Luis thought he saw a small reaction, but it could have been a reflection of the candle.  

“Tía,” prodded gently.

“Shhh,” she hissed. “Dios mio.”

“The yuca.” Luis’s mouth curled into a half-smile. “I’m very hungry, and I’ve gotten so skinny. All my friends are going to make fun of me.”

Tía’s eyes slowly came back into focus. She turned and looked at Luis as if seeing him for the first time that day. In fact, he’d been there for hours, and this was their fourth Judge Fernando episode together. Tía fully met Luis’s eyes just as the TV personality began his stern deliberation over the custody of a cocker spaniel. 

“Angelito,” she said, tearing up with recognition. “Guapo Angelito. So handsome. But skin and bones! Let me make you some yuca. Your friends are going to make fun of you.”

“Thanks, Tía. But the yuca is done.”

“You keep watching for me while I cook. Quiero saber sobre el perro.”

“Of course, Tía. It’s a cute dog,” he said. She’d been leaning more heavily on Spanish lately, and Luis wondered if it had anything to do with her condition. 

He took Tía’s hand to lift her out of the old recliner. Her name was Isabella Lopez, and she and Luis weren’t technically blood-related, but she refused to be called anything other than Tía. This was to honor Luis’s actual mother. 

The story went like this:

Tía was driving on a back road at night and spotted a woman in a truck bed on the side of the road, holding a baby in a blue blanket and waving her free arm. When Tía had stopped to see if the woman was okay, the figure stepped into the moonlight and held Luis out in desperation. 

Tía said she knew from the fine hair that covered Luis's body that he had just been born, and she checked the fingers and toes to see if the baby was healthy. She turned her ear to listen to Luis's breathing. The young woman whispered Luis’s name, and when Tía looked up, she had vanished. 

The land around the road had been quite open and empty, and there weren’t many places to hide. In perfect Tía fashion, the disappearance had clearly been a sign that this woman was otherworldly and divine and spiritual.  

Luis told himself a very different story about his birth mother and why she’d disappeared. His version involved cowardice and selfishness and disinterest.  

Whenever Tía brought up Luis’s mother, about how she must be looking down from heaven with such pride at her little angel, Luis changed the subject as quickly as possible, not wanting Tía to see his resentment. 

Tía was in her seventies now, grey and small, and wasting away. Day by day, being stolen from him, dragged away by age and disease. From the way she now looked, it was ironic that she’d called Luis skin and bones. Luis wondered if she’d been forgetting to eat her meals again.

Luis put a hand on Tía’s gaunt elbow for extra support as she rose. She gasped at his touch, falling back into her chair, making a cross over her chest.

“What is it, Tía?” Luis asked.

“Angelito, Your hands!”

Luis gave an inward grimace. He thought that the concealer would work—it took at least three different shops to find his exact skin tone—but the steam from the yuca water had caused it to run and smear. 

Luis tucked his hands behind his back. “It’s nothing.”

“Fighting again!”

“No, Tía, I don’t know what you—”

She slapped him hard in the face. As hard as she was capable of. Luis pretended that it hurt, so she would feel like she got the message across. He didn’t nurse his cheek, however, because that would give her an even closer look at the damage. 

“We don’t tolerate fighting in this family!” Tía said firmly.  

Luis hoped her yelling wasn’t loud enough to call in any of the nurses. David Z. always lurked nearby whenever Luis came to visit, watching him too closely. 

“Yes. I know. I fell on the sidewalk—”

Tía slapped Luis again, about as hard as a sunbeam. And then she pulled him close and started peppering him with kisses on his cheeks. “Qué lástima, how many times do I have to tell you! No fighting! Fighting brings evil spirits.”

Luis didn’t try to stop her or argue.  

“I swear,” he said. “It’s not what you think. I’m not fighting just to fight.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie because Tía probably had no clue why he was doing it and where. And she definitely wouldn’t know they paid more if you went in without gloves.

She sighed and then pinched his cheek. Her eyes got wet at the corners, but she was still present. “Angelito. You’re all I have. I can’t let you get swallowed up. El diable tiene hambre.”

Luis gave her a gentle smile. “Well, then it’s a good thing I’m so skinny.”

Judgment squished up her face. “El que da primero da dos veces.”

He who strikes first strikes twice. 

Luis kept his back to the Mask of Quetzalcoatl and helped Tía to the kitchen, past the seashells they'd gathered over the years at the shore. Stacked next to the shells were the copper coins Tía always insisted they bring with them to the ocean, to be put on the belly button at the first sign of seasickness. There wasn’t any danger of that since seasickness involved boats, and boats were expensive, yet Tía brought the coins every time. Luis didn't want to look at the coins either. There had been no return trips to their spot since Tía's mind had begun to slip.

She muttered a few things under her breath while she rearranged a few gemstones in wooden bowls. Then she sliced up the mushy yuca with the long metal spatula the nurses let her have instead of a knife, and the two of them set up in front of the TV again, laying their meal on trays.

They watched Judge Fernando, and for a while, Luis felt at home. It was nothing compared to the small apartment they had before everything went south, but the nursing home was good enough. The best Luis could afford. 

When he was here, all the pressure, all rage and anger, all the dirt and hunger and rats in the walls, everything ugly went away when he was sitting at his aunt’s side. Just a normal family watching TV, eating a normal, albeit tasteless, meal.  

Normal as breathing. 

Even with the bags of water hanging from the ceiling, the stench of the elephant garlic, the scattered bottles of contra embrujo, and the green and yellow rubber snake coiled in a small cage under the bed—a warning for La Malinche—nothing felt out of the ordinary. Everything was okay. So rarely was that the case these days.

At the first commercial break, Luis rubbed the back of his Tía’s hand once more. Her skin was like old paper left out in the sun. 

“Can I get you a soda?” he asked. “I can go back to the cafeteria. What kind of soda do you want?

She turned her head slowly and then began whimpering. Luis could see it in her eyes. The worst kind of glaze. Luis knew where this was heading, and his heart went cold. 

The Dark Place. A place Luis couldn’t follow.

The glaze had been a harbinger. It had been a few weeks since her last full episode, and Luis knew he shouldn’t have let his guard down. 

Tía pushed herself back in her chair, spilling the mushy yuca on the floor.

“No te conozco,” she whimpered, drawing a cross over her chest.

“You know me,” Luis said slowly. “Luis. I’m Luis.”

She pushed away further, covering herself with her arms and rocking back and forth. She started hissing at him, making more crosses with her fingers and thrusting them at him like daggers. 

“It’s me,” he said. “Luis. Angelito. You know me.”

But it was no use. Tía started to cry and shake her head, speaking in frantic Spanish. She looked around the room, wide-eyed like a newborn. She asked where she was, who Luis was, and so on. Luis raced out of his chair and pushed the button on the wall calling the nurse. 

After a moment, the door opened. In came Devon, the older male nurse from Haiti. Luis relaxed. His aunt was in good hands.

“Episode?” Devon asked. 

Luis nodded, stepping away. 

Devon knelt down next to Tía, pills already in his hand, along with a half-empty bottle of water. He made soothing cooing noises and helped her take the sertraline.

“The sky is open,” Devon cooed. “The ocean wide. But you’re safe in here; you’re safe inside. The sky is open and the ocean wide. But you’re safe in here…”

He continued the slow, soothing rhyme. Devon’s voice was heavy and deep, accented, his voice naturally calming. Tía took the pills, and Devon continued his soft chant, stroking her thin grey hair. She started to relax and then pulled Devon closer and whispered in his ear, eyes on Luis like daggers. 

Luis already knew what she was saying without having to ask.

“Come back tomorrow,” Devon said. “She’ll be better tomorrow. She knows you; she’s just confused.”

Luis nodded. He felt like he should hug his aunt before he left, but he didn’t want her to start screaming again, and already he’d gone numb inside. The pain of seeing her that way was always too much, and he’d become an expert at shutting down. Shutting it out. He threw shadows over his emotions like a blanket, telling his heart to quiet.  

No attempt at a hug, he gave Devon a thankful nod and went to leave. Tía kept a basket of apples on a table near the door to collect negative energies from visitors. Luis gathered the bruised and browning ones in a plastic bag to take outside and dump. 

Tía continued to moan in confusion and sorrow, hissing at Luis to leave, but he knew she’d feel better later, knowing there were ripe apples in the basket. It was nonsense, but it was her nonsense.  

As soon as Luis was out the door, he clenched his hands into fists, not caring that it made further cracks in the concealer. That it revealed skinned flesh. Let the nurses see his hands as they were really. Let them know what he was made to do to survive. To keep his aunt in their care.  

The world kept hitting him, and he had no choice but to hit back. Deal the damage yourself, become fierce, become strong, or become a victim. 

Tía, bless her, was wrong about fighting. 

Fighting didn’t attract the evil spirits. 

Fighting was the only way to make them go away.  

Luis shut the door gently and began down the hallway, fuming. A hand grabbed his shoulder almost immediately, spinning him around and revealing the smug face of his least favorite patient care assistant. Luis forced himself to relax outwardly, although inside, he was already raging. 

David Zhao—although he went by David Z.—gave Luis the inquisitive sneer that rarely left his face. 

“Louis,” he said, pronouncing it like loo-is. 

“It’s Luis. You know it’s Luis.”

“Yes. Sure. Mrs. Coughlin is missing her brooch, Loo-is.”

“And?”

The pinching fingers remained on Luis’s shoulder. Luis began counting slowly to ten inside. It took everything in him to keep from hissing a threat. He had to play nice with the staff in order for them to play nice with Tía. 

“It was a very expensive brooch,” David Z said. “Mrs. Coughlin was in the cafeteria earlier. You were in the cafeteria earlier.”

Luis scraped his back teeth together hard. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Listen. I know what it’s like for you people.” He cleared his throat. “Young people. You see something shiny, and one thing leads to another.”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

David Z. looked over his shoulder and then lowered his voice. “All I’m saying is that if there happened to be a brooch in your pocket right now… I’ll understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I understand that the thrill of stealing might be,” he paused, sucking his teeth. “Seductive to you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Luis spat.

David Z.’s head cocked innocently to the side, but there was a wicked grin beneath. “Laws are important, Luis. I mean, I know your kind doesn't necessarily agree, but admitting you can be wrong is the first step towards maturity. It's probably time for you to grow up and stop being selfish.”

Luis’s imagination swung a fist.

His punch was hard, fast, and accurate: the kind that had gotten him a reputation at the Ring. A nose-splitting cross. A jaw-breaking hit. 

But it wasn’t real. 

He couldn’t risk actually attacking one of the staff. Not only would that get him banned and land him back in front of a judge—and he was getting dangerously close to being tried as an adult—but there would be retaliation against Tía. There were a hundred different secret and cruel ways old people could be abused in places like this. 

And so the punch was only mental. But it felt real, and that helped release some of Luis’s boiling anger. He imagined the skin on David Z’s cheek pulverized, splitting and leaking blood. He imagined three teeth knocked out. He imagined a body on the ground, spasming, apologizing.  

Luis turned and stormed away. He wanted to knock all the fake flowers from the tables and fake art from the walls. He wanted to rip up the low-quality carpet that had cigarette burns. He wanted to hit someone’s door so hard that the peeling vinyl coating fell off entirely. 

He’d have to wait until leaving the nursing home. He quickly ran through an inventory in his head of what he could destroy. Glass bottles were always good. Any glass, really. The window of an abandoned building. There was that old defunct drugstore off Jefferson that he could vandalize, where no one would call the cops. 

Anger speared Luis in the stomach like a hot poker, and he needed to redirect the pain. He felt like running to the cafeteria and yelling at the cooks for only ever serving baked potatoes and bananas and never plantains or yuca. He very nearly ran to the rec room and slammed his fists on the perpetually out-of-tune piano. 

They did so many things to make this hellhole seem like it was beautiful, but this place was not beautiful. Hopelessness rose up between cracks, letting known the festering rot beneath. All the bleach, perfumes, and fake flowers in the world couldn’t hide such a thing for long. 

This was a poisonous place that attracted poisonous people, like Mrs. Couglin’s lawyer grandson, who always came dressed in thousand-dollar suits and fancy watches. He snapped his fingers at Luis in the cafeteria, commanding him to clean up their plates when he knew full well Luis didn’t work there. A fancy lawyer like that could afford to put Mrs. Coughlin somewhere nice, somewhere comfortable and warm, and Luis knew a man like that only chose a budget nursing home like this in order to squeeze every cent out of his inheritance. 

Luis left David Z. further behind and stopped at the receptionist’s station at the entrance, writing Tía a quick letter saying that he’d see her soon and that the yuca was delicious as always. 

The receptionist was lost in a Cosmo magazine. She was a blonde lady named Samantha who always offered Luis a breath mint. What would it be like to be a nice, unburdened blonde lady with an unlimited supply of breath mints, Luis wondered. What did someone like that worry about? Did they even worry at all? 

Luis sealed the envelope. Samantha looked up and squinted at him as if trying to remember something.  

“You’re related to Misses Lopez in one eighty-six, correct?” she asked.  

Luis nodded, waving the note. “Her nephew.”

“I think I’ve got a message from accounting.” She sifted through a messy stack and then picked a piece of paper out, looking somewhat annoyed at having to step out of whatever juicy scandal she was reading about. “Looks like her payment is three days overdue.” 

Luis nodded, doing his best to hold back. “Yeah, sorry about that. It’s coming. There was a hold up transferring the funds and—” 

“Hey, not my circus, not my monkeys,” she said. “I just work here.”

She made a flippant gesture and returned her gaze to her magazine. She offered Luis a breath mint without looking up, and he accepted. They were wintergreen today.

Luis gave the letter a kiss and slid it across the desk. Tía said she could tell if Luis kissed the letters or not. He figured maybe she checked for spit marks. He didn’t want her to come out of the Dark Place and feel like she’d been abandoned. 

He turned and barreled out of the door, teeth grit, still fantasizing about bashing in David Z.’s face. He couldn’t get the anger out fighting at the Ring tonight since his hands badly needed a rest, and he’d have to settle for crashing a few harmless bricks into broken windows.  

He took out one of the used-up apples from the bag and bit into one, the juice dripping down his chin. Then he threw the bag in a rusty dumpster that was spilling over with garbage, a week overdue from being emptied. 

He paused, looked around, and then subtly touched a hand to the pocket he’d been covering with the bag of apples. 

Mrs. Coughlin’s brooch was small and heavy. 

More of a chance that it might be valuable. 

He knew the score. He was never ashamed of what he did to keep his aunt alive and happy, even if it was in a place like this. He wasn’t a fancy lawyer. He didn’t have options. 

And it wasn’t like he was stealing it from Mrs. Coughlin, who was a hundred and two and didn’t know a brooch from a serving spoon. He was pre-stealing it from her racist jackass son, who only stayed for about ten minutes a visit and read the newspaper the whole time he was sitting next to her. 

Luis finished the rotten apple slowly so as not to seem suspicious and chewed up the core, spitting the seeds into the pile of old stained curtains sitting on top of the trash. 

His fists clenched in pain and anger, itching for release.