The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Rico meets his parents

This was it. Ricardo squared his shoulders as he stepped into the tiled lake of the hospital. A massive hole was circling and circling below his diaphragm. People stretched and swayed like palm fronds; even their voices sounded distorted like through a giant cone of static. But he had a plan, and that was all he needed.

He steadied his hands on reception desk and squinted stupidly at the bobbed haired nurse. She whisked hands from writing board to writing board in a seemingly constructed stance to ignore him. 

“Rico? Going to see your brother?”

That was Aunty Abomination in a navy blue frilly blouse and hose, knee-length skirt of funeral hearse black, her business-like pullback hair, her eye ovoid jellies behind large-framed spectacles.

Tiger Balls.  He gathered his disappointment with a smile, which she replied with a dismissive everted turn of the lips, and then she led the way to Jésus’ room. Like a miniature soldier, she moved through the white corridors. She had not come to the hospital to see Jésus, she said contritely. A member of her church had fallen ill and needed her celebrated concoction of prayers.  Lupus, kidney stones, maybe that disease killing sodomites, nobody knew what afflicted her Hermana en Cristo. But she would find out soon enough after blasting her cannons at the fortress of the demons taken hold in her body.

With genteel detachment, Ricardo nodded along, wondered about the unshapely rump behind her stiff skirt, nodded affirmatively over the one-two hook to knock out the Devil. By the elevator, they gazed on its smooth greyness in fidgety silence. The jabber of nurses ebbing away, another wave of unease crested. 

Ricardo blurted, “How’s Office Guillermo doing?”

She stood a few paces to his right; her lips worked to the left. Ricardo hated the look and the guilt it evoked. Guilt also had its way of being mollified with bright broad smiles and roguish musings on Inez and Guillermo sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.  But Officer Guillermo was a rabid Catholic. She was a rabid evangelical.  And Ricardo prophesied raucous love beneath all their porch-side squabbles on the perfect Mexican pickles.

“Tía,” Ricardo said in the darling nephew tone, “You just need to tell him—”

“You lied to me about staying with Gaspar.” Waiting for his repentant look, she chewed and chewed her lower lip

Scratching an ear, Ricardo looked to the wall fountain to her left. “I did?”

“You lied to me.” She tapped on the buttons impatiently. “I don’t lie to you. God doesn’t like liars. Why do you lie?” The elevator doors dinged open but inside was unhelpfully empty. The great shrieking sermon on lies and truth, God and judgment, did not abate as they arranged themselves inside the steel box, and fixed their eyes upward at the LCD dial flashing the floor numbers. “Satan is an unashamed liar. Do you want to be like Satan?” 

The elevator clicked and juddered. Ricardo let her words level him, chirp him off molecule by molecule. A blasé rictus chiseled on his face, he pondered the heights of hate and the lows of love. For sure she was disgusted with him, but hate him? She was now flipping her pocket bible for the important point of Jesus being the truth. More words were pelted on him like hail, and Ricardo still could not diagnose the particular tone in her voice that would belie her hatred of him. He could ask, perhaps he should ask, but he knew she would reply, “Of course not, God is love.” So was this is it, dry duty that enforced loving harsh words?