As a boy, the fear in my home held together my kingdom. On Sundays, this fear was thickest, mucky and grimy, a hip-high marsh of feelings that everyone in my family woke up with and waded through. Sundays meant early mornings in which we all woke from our thin, short-lived dreams and opened our rickety bedroom doors. My older brothers, my sister, my mother, we all walked through the hallways of our ruined suburban home—our bare feet crusted black by the dirty linoleum floors that roaches crawled upon, gathering in the shadowed corners behind furniture and inside cabinets, and outside scourges of mosquitoes flying by our brightened windows, humming against the thin panels of glass that separated us from the leeches and snakes that slithered in the backyard, that separated us from the frogs, the colony of frogs, that hopped through our wet Florida grass, burrowed down into the dirt and swam in our ruined, pool-turned-swamp, day and night—our morning tour of the creatures we shared our kingdom with. Together, we sat down in our kitchen for breakfast. We ate at our cheap, wooden table as a family.
Those Sunday mornings of creatures, God, my Puerto Rican family, and our American neighborhood were held by unspoken knots of fear. We felt those knots in every footstep we took, in every thud each time a door slammed shut, every time the frogs croaked outside, or the roaches scurried past us into our cabinets, closets, bedrooms. The fear gnawed and pulled, bit and tore at us. But it wasn’t God we feared. Our fear was earthly. My single mother and her inevitable bankruptcy, me and my impending baptism, my oldest brother and his adolescent hatred and violence—these were our differing lives, rife with problems that were all a part of the same kingdom of creatures. Deep down, I realize, the fear was the same for each of us in my Puerto Rican family: the fear that someone from school, from our neighborhood, from work would find out the truth about us.
• •
A week before I was baptized, the violence started. I sat at my kitchen table scarfing down the farina my mother had just cooked for me. I was seven years old. My brothers and sister, all older than I, squeezed in with me at the table while my mother scrubbed dishes furiously at the sink. I could hear my abuela doing laundry out back, swinging open the screen door every few minutes, and I remember this because the creaking and banging of that door always made me flinch, afraid that that the creatures that had overtaken our backyard might burst their way into the rest of our home.
Still, I was eager to step out into the backyard that I was both afraid of and excited by. I was hungry to walk and crawl through my playground-turned-wilderness, to soak it all in as the thick Florida heat beat down on my burnished brown skin.
“Outside!” I shouted, and pointed my finger in the air.
“Don’t forget next week,” my mother said as she washed dishes in the sink. “You’ll have nice clothes. We’ll get there early.”
“Why? What are we doing?” I asked.
“Church, papi. You and Esme’s baptism. And wipe your face,” she said.
Seven years old, I sat dumbly at the table, cream smeared on my mouth, while my mother continued cleaning. The air was still smoky from her pan-frying, thick with the smell of bacon grease. Gene and Shaun leaned back in their chairs, as they always did, their bony, oily teenage bodies splayed out on the seat and table, neither of them saying much, the both of them content with their teenage quiet, while Esme and I, our feet barely reaching the ground, leaned forward on the edge of our chairs, bickering with one another, stumbling over our words, our thoughts loud and clumsy, still learning our family’s age-old tradition of silence.
I looked at my siblings, but they each sat quietly, their faces not so much indifferent as defensively blank, a learned stoicism needed to get through the days. I looked at my mother, at how the sunlight from the sink window beat down on her tanned, white skin. Her fingers were pruned, raw red from the soaping and scrubbing she did constantly in her house, always seemingly hunched over and turned away from me with her head down, scraping away at whatever dirt kept encrusting onto our lives.
Why I was receiving a late baptism I didn’t know, but it was required for my First Communion. I wanted to ask more, but I knew not to. I knew from my mother’s tired voice and short answers, from my siblings’ heavy silence, that explanations cost too much in our household, that getting through the day, our little, familial survivals, required hacking off any excesses, material or otherwise, that didn’t contribute to the countenance of our crumbling home and Puerto Rican lives.
“I don’t wanna get baptized,” I said, and stomped my foot.
“Don’t be a baby,” Esme said flatly. “Jesus died for you.” She pulled her short, brown hair back behind her ears, a misshapen bob cut that she had secretly done on her own with scissors. “And wipe your face, pig.”
Mom put a dish down. “Callate. You’re both going. All God asks of you is that you come and visit his home every once in a while.”
His home, I remember saying to myself. What about my home? I stood quiet for a moment. I remember watching a roach, bigger than my thumb, climb out from behind the kitchen cabinet, up the wall toward the flimsy, framed copy of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I watched it climb past the frame, past Jesus and his twelve apostles, up toward the ceiling before scurrying back down into the shadows. If I have to deal with roaches, why can’t God? I thought.
“No. No quiero!” I said finally. “Why doesn’t God come here?”
Esme and Gene laughed, but Shaun, my oldest brother, remained silent. I threw myself back into the chair, slumped down, and folded my arms. Then I glanced up at Shaun. He was slouching, face cupped in his hand. I always looked at him whenever I did anything. He was the oldest and everything about him was sharp and teetering—his buzz-cut hair, his narrow, angular face, buckteeth, flimsy tank tops that covered his blotched red, pimpled skin—a Puerto Rican knife held in the unsteady hands of adolescence. He didn’t look at me or move or say a word.
My mother narrowed her eyes at me, so I tried to poke at her in a different way.
“Fine,” I said. “Can my friend come over to play then?” Everyone stayed quiet. I knew what the answer was going to be, though, but at my age I still wasn’t exactly sure of the why.
“Mom!” I shouted. “Can my friend Bryce come over to play?”
She was too ashamed to get upset with me. She smiled weakly. “Not today, papi.”
“Why!” I said, pounding on the table, rattling the dishes.
Shaun punched me on the arm, hard.
“Stop it. Both of you,” she said.
I rubbed my arm, scowling. Esme got up to bring some more plates to the sink while Shaun sat with his arms folded. No one seemed to move or speak for what felt like awhile, as if each of our lives was being drowned out by the sound of the dirty dishes clinking together, by the running sink water, the kitchen table’s creaks, the neighbors’ lawn mower’s humming, the screen door creaking and banging, the croaking of frogs outside. We all sat with this noise, listening to the sounds of what was every day in our home.
“He wouldn’t have come anyways,” I said finally.
Shaun slammed his fist on the table, rattling everything. “Are you freaking stupid?” he said and scowled.
“Watch your mouth, Shaun!” Mom shouted.
I tried to scowl back at him. He was fourteen years old, gangly, pimpled on his face and back, white-skinned. He hadn’t said much to me since he came back a month ago after running away from home. We couldn’t have been more different—oldest and youngest, brown skin and white skin, fed up and curious. I tried to imitate his face, but it was no use. Shaun’s scowl was different from everyone else’s—from mine, my mother’s, or Esme’s, or Gene’s. It gnarled his face into a deep-set look no one could imitate, as if the potential for violence yielded a special contortion to his face: it scared me, and I wanted to learn it.
He stood up from his chair, fists clenched, looking down at me.
“Shaun, calm down,” Mom said.
I remember wanting him to do something to me with his fists, to show me what he knew, for him to let his fists say what no one could say about how we all felt. I knew he hated our home, our family, and I thought I did too, but I was unsure of how much of my boyish hatred was mine and how much I was learning from him.
I clenched my fists under the table, waiting. I had not yet learned how violence could upend a family, how it flooded through the present, and in doing so, hardened the past and future into not only dreams and memories, beliefs and wishes, but also a brown kid’s destiny, a life forever recounted and anticipated in my heart and mind. I had not yet learned this, but I would that day. For some reason, Shaun held back in that moment. He decided to save what he felt for later. He stormed off to his room, and I watched him walk off. It was one of many Sunday lessons, a lesson learned through my family’s silence that no friends, ever, were allowed to visit the wilderness that was our home.
• •
In his essay “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger writes that what separates animals from man is “its lack of common language, its silence” which guarantees its “distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man.” I remember this striking me as true when I read it, though not because I felt a part of the world of man, from which animals stood on the outskirts of, but because I had always felt a distance, distinctness, and exclusion from man. For my Puerto Rican family, the heavy silence that often filled our home, the thickened quiet that settled atop our Sunday mornings, in which no English or Spanish was spoken, but rather was filled with the creaturely noises around us—this, it seems, was our way of admitting we had no common language to share with the American country we lived in or the human neighbors that lived all around us.
Surviving in a ruined home, we were ashamed to not be living like the white-suburban families around us. Words like “prosperity” or “freedom” or “American” rang hollow in our minds, without a reference point in our day-to-day lives, seemingly untranslatable, linguistic shadows hanging over the house we lived in. Without a common language, we believed we were too “wild,” not because of our biology, but because we were Puerto Ricans.
As a boy, left to these silences, a truth started to creep into my mind. I had a creeping feeling that the truth about my Puerto Rican family was that we were creatures like the ones living among us. And there was nothing I was more afraid of than this truth.
To step out my front door and see the pristine, Central Florida lawns, the sparkling driveways and white neighbors, even my suburban elementary school terrified me—not because my surroundings were frightening but because I was. The first thing I ever learned to be frightened of was myself, as if the sole obstruction between me and the beauty of boyhood was a razor-sharp wilderness grown by my own brown body. I was painfully aware of who I was from my perspective and from the perspective of the white families in my neighborhood and school—a “double-consciousness” as the writer W. E .B. Du Bois termed it.
At recess when the white American kids pointed and laughed at the “swamp house” by the playground, I said nothing. No one—not my classmates or teachers—knew I lived in that house. Whenever a kid shouted about who lived in that abandoned-looking home with its pool-turned-swamp, its overgrown backyard of weeds and palmetto bushes, overrun by frogs and roaches and snakes and leeches, I, too, looked around with the rest of the kids, half-expecting a wild version of myself to appear from the thicket of trees and bushes and creatures, thorns sprouting from my skin, hand raised guiltily, confessing to a sin plainly obvious to everyone else.
I tried to fight this off by being more American, which I equated to being more human. I sought out a white American culture in hopes that it would save me, convinced that the only seeming escape to the fear I felt was to dress and talk and think like the white kids I knew. Walking to and from school, I used to say: I wish I were white, I wish I were white. Acculturation as an escape from myself was my first boyhood obsession. I had inherited it from my father and mother.
• •
“El negro” and “los animales” was what the white jíbaros used to call my father and his family in Puerto Rico. They were disgusted by his skin, by the cement home he and his family grew up in down in the valley, removed from the rest of the town. When he was eighteen, he left for New York City where he and my mother met and eventually married. When I was a year old, they moved us to Florida to take care of my mother’s elderly parents, who were in poor health. My father, my white-skinned mother, whose white grandparents had come directly from Spain to Puerto Rico, represented a kind of salvation from his damned dark skin, his “brutish” native family. However false my father’s narrative was, the psychology behind it wasn’t. My father’s fragile sense of worth due to legacies of colonialism was desperate for validation by those he understood as not only better than he, but more human. The philosopher Frantz Fanon describes the pathology of this inferiority complex best when he writes: “By loving me, [the white woman] proves to me that I am worthy of a white love . . . white civilization and worthiness become mine.” Like father, like son, we both felt the hungry dilemma of civilization, with seemingly no way to satiate our shameful appetites.
By the time I was two years old, my grandfather died of cirrhosis and prostate cancer. His lifelong love of liquor and smoking eventually caught up to him. Soon after his death, my mother divorced my father because of his own alcoholism and his unpredictable rage and abuse. My father’s white validation was gone. Devastated and ashamed, he became estranged from our lives.
As for my mother, with no child support, she struggled to handle the debts she inherited from her parents, much less our suburban home that she had inherited, which was falling into disrepair and ruin. By the time I started forming my first memories, my mother was being driven into bankruptcy on her bank teller’s salary. But in spite of her misfortune, she believed our Puerto Rican lives were in our hands.
My mother believed fervently in the American ideals of rugged individualism, which coupled well with the Catholic religion we worshipped that preached personal accountability. In a free country, under the governance of God, my Puerto Rican family was supposed to be in complete control of our destinies. Whether we flourished or not was our responsibility, at least these were the myths we believed. They were the all-too-powerful “American stories” that seeped deeper and deeper into my skin each time I said the pledge of allegiance at school, my little brown body belting out the words as loud as I could, or whenever I was lectured about how fortunate I was to be getting an American education that neither my father or grandparents received, or on the rare occasions I was invited to my white classmates for birthday parties, my hands shaking with excitement as I stood inside their suburban homes as if I had somehow sneaked my way into a promised land.
In the land of opportunities, the greatest opportunity I had been gifted was a chance at an American self and identity. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson writes. My family and I tried to hear that American song of self that our hearts could vibrate to, but our hearts heard a different tune, thumped to a melody unplayable on the iron strings of America.
• •
After Sunday breakfast, I played in my backyard. I laid my action figures onto the grass and sat down, cross-legged.
I don’t want to be baptized, I thought. A ceremonial baptism was mysterious to me. Even if I was ashamed of my home, it was what I knew. What I understood was the backyard I sat in, filled with creatures, not the church I attended, filled with humans. I didn’t understand the Catholic God my mother brought us to every week—the lone authority and solace she knew to turn to in her otherwise overworked days as a single mother. We had our home and we had God’s home. One of them, she hoped, would raise us.
The sun beat down on my face as I dug holes to bury my action figures. Frogs popped out of the ground as I did. I laid the toys down into the dirt and said aloud: “Lord have mercy. Rest in peace.” Then I crawled away, laughing to myself, laughing at the words and lessons from church that rang differently in my home, not so much hollow as uncertainly, as if the very noise and meaning of biblical language changed when it was housed in my kingdom rather than God’s.
In church, I grabbed desperately at words like these, at the lessons they held that were spoken to me as a way to explain my life—love, faith, suffering, good and evil, heaven and hell, death and resurrection. I attached these words to the rites and symbols in church, the sacraments of bread and wine, the holy water I splashed on my forehead, Jesus crucified at the altar.
But these words and their meanings seemed to dissolve in front of me the moment I came home.
The teachings I received in church seemed meant for someone else, a way of living for humans, not the creature I felt I was. The cathedral we went to, “God’s home,” as my mother called it, was like no home I knew. The hallowed, white walls, the pristine, gold-accented altar and stained-glass windows I understood as holy, and I could understand the words and lessons this holy place said to me as I stood inside it, but what these words meant when used in the context of my day-to-day, dirty, poor, Puerto Rican life I couldn’t figure out. I began to believe that my life was simply untranslatable, that God’s home and his words were for humans but not for a creature like me.
A slow terror started to build in me as a boy, one in which, like Moses, I feared showing my face in the presence of God, much less the humans his words were spoken to. The best I could wish for was to merely be Moses’s walking-stick-turned-snake, both an object and creature subject to the whims of man and his God. But as I think about biblical stories like this now, I wonder if sticks and animals are what it means to be brown and Puerto Rican in America—to be in a constant state of flux due to the hands of others, clay-like in your everchanging heart and mind?
In church school, I had learned about humans and their rule over animals. While the other kids stirred in their chairs about the prospect of getting into heaven, I flipped through the thin pages of my mother’s King James Bible, the one that I’d stolen from her bedroom. It was the word “animals” from the opening parts of Genesis that caught my eye:
So God made the wild animals, the tame animals, and all the small crawling animals to produce more of their own kind. God saw that this was good. Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image and likeness. And let them rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the tame animals, over all the earth, and over all the small crawling animals on the earth.”
This is what stayed with me from church—the wilderness of Genesis. I had no reference for its assurances about human beings having been made in God’s likeness, but the crawling animals, the act of creation and how primordial the world seemed, that was deeply familiar to me as a boy. At home and inside myself, creatures and wilderness abounded.
When I got up from the dirt, I walked over and stood in front of my pool. I stared at my murky reflection, the contours of me unclear, porous. Dragonflies buzzed above the water, lily pads floated in the water while tadpoles swam in the corners of the deep end. Then I walked over to our shed, the shed my father had built, with its fist-sized hole in its window. I climbed up, my legs dangling in the air, and peered inside at the rakes and shears piled together, the busted lawnmower in the corner. I breathed in the smell of gasoline before I jumped back down. Frogs rested by my feet. I could see the dark spots and splotches on their warty skin, and I could see their light underbellies each time they hopped in the air. These creatures, this home, I knew well, and yet what could be more confusing than to be ashamed by the very things you so intimately know? Faced with this confusion, what could be more fitting, more American than to use violence as a remedy for shame?
I stood over one of the frogs and reared back. I kicked it as hard as I could. It flew across the yard, tumbling into the grass. It lay on its back, unmoving. I smiled, satisfied.
All this is mine, I thought. I love my backyard.
I looked around to see if anyone was watching, but no one was around. A life of dirt and grime, this is what I understood. The garden snakes that I poked with sticks, the leeches I poured salt on, the palmetto bugs I chased at and ran from—they all seemed as vulnerable and raw as me, subject to my whims as I was to others. Oh, how I loved the thought of having my very own Genesis, a primordial wonder where I could fling myself against my chain-link fence, dive into bushes and climb trees, pee in the grass and clean myself with leaves. All of it was my much-needed world, a place for my boyish curiosity and creation, a need to see what would happen, how it would happen, and what my relationship, if any, was to all of it. I stood up straight and flexed my small biceps. Then I raised my arms into the sky: This, this is my kingdom.
• •
“The past is all around us,” said the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. “[A]ll individual organisms are connected through time.” I wonder now to what extent is this biological truth also racially and culturally true. Because if this is the biological truth we see when, as Margulis said, “the carbon dioxide we exhale as a waste product becomes the life-giving force for a plant [and] the oxygen waste of a plant gives us life,” then it seems to also be the cultural, racial truth when I see my brown child self, infected with pinworms from my dirty home, or playing among the frogs and mosquitoes and leeches in my backyard, or falling asleep in my roach-infested room, afraid of my baptism, with the seeds of shame for my Puerto Rican family growing inside me. Are these not all interconnected and interdependent? In either case, the past envelops us.
The past, both biological and anthropological, has always seemed to me to be a kind of inheritance, the living heirlooms passed on from one living thing to the next, and the realities of this inheritance is that my body continues to be merely one of the many organisms that the past moves through, one that, like the grass and soil my feet sink into, has existed in the ecosystem of my country long before I ever ran and jumped in my swampy backyard, pedaled my bicycle past the US Confederate flags hanging from neighbors’ homes, or kneeled and prayed in the pews of my Catholic church.
To my mind, being caught up in this ever-changing dynamic, to be vulnerable to the fluctuations of the past, is what it really means to be a creature. Julia Lupton, professor of comparative literature, echoes this sentiment when she describes a “creature [as] actively passive or, better, passionate, perpetually becoming created, subjected to transformation at the behest of the arbitrary commands of an Other.” In my case, “perpetually becoming created” didn’t only apply to the biological truths about my life, my breathing and eating and growing, but also applied to my family’s poverty, our Puerto Rican shame, our desperate and inadequate attempts to fit into American society, all of which were part of the ecosystem of our everyday lives.
The cesspool that was my backyard and my ruined home cannot not be detached from the American culture I was struggling to survive in, sludged with the divisions of racial hierarchy and colonial superiority that had been brought about at the “behest” of an “Other.” What was this Other, I realize, but the white supremacist country I lived in, a creator that revealed to me my creatureliness through, to paraphrase professor of Germanic Studies Eric Santner, a continual exposure to traumatic political power.
The upshot of political power is not merely the freedom of groups to act as they please but also the naturalization of certain truths in the name of that political power. Power is required for the word American to be conflated with the word human in a young Puerto Rican kid’s mind, a distortion motivated by the “profitable brutalities” that come from conflation of the “[Western] Man-as-human” as the geographer Katherine McKittrick notes.
To be American, I learned as a boy, was to be human. And whatever failures I experienced attempting to do so was not merely laziness or a lack of will or missed opportunity or biological misfortune, according to the American society I grew up in, but rather my outright refusal to acculturate better than my ancestors did, indisputable evidence that Puerto Ricans were (as American doctors, Army generals, politicians, and even US presidents had claimed throughout the twentieth century): “degenerate and thievish,” “unfit for self-governance,” “savage people,” “a mass of mongrels,” “an inferior race.” My ancestors’ colonial dilemma had been falsely naturalized into a human dilemma. And so, to be human by virtue of being American was, then, merely an obfuscation of the past. This was real fear I felt as a kid growing up, the hold that settled on Sunday mornings in my home, the one I believed I needed to confess to my classmates, in church. My fear was not that I was a creature, but that by virtue of who and what I was—a brown Puerto Rican—I was deeply aware of the past, that I had no choice but to feel the interdependence and interconnection of organisms through time.
• •
I remember continuing to march through my wet backyard, savoring the feeling of muck falling away from my feet, the whole time smiling, believing that my backyard would love me and mold me into whatever I wanted it to be. The outside could cleanse me of the inside. God could have his home, and I would have mine. Naïve a boy as I was, this was the best I could do to embrace the past living through me.
When I sat down by the fence, next to my action-figure graveyard, I heard shouting in the distance. I pushed my family’s wet laundry hanging on the clothesline out of the way and looked through the chain-links to see where it was coming from. In the distance, I saw a couple of white kids riding their bikes.
I pressed my face into the fence, watching them race one another down the hill, taking turns attempting wheelies. They can climb the fence, I thought. Jump down into the grass. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about what my brother had said. Are you freaking stupid? I said to myself. No one, ever, comes to our house.
I crouched down and started to unearth my action figures so that I could hurry back inside, but when I looked up again, the boys were riding their bikes in my direction. They had seen me.
They stopped a few feet short of the fence. They were older, middle schoolers whom I
didn’t recognize. They crouched down and looked at me, at my home.
“What the heck!” one of them shouted.
“Is this a swamp?”
“Dude! It’s a swamp. Kid, you live in a swamp!”
They looked stunned, eyes wide and mouths open; they looked as if they were staring through into a different world. “It’s a zoo!” one of them shouted, and the others laughed. I didn’t move. I was paralyzed by their laughter. All I could do was clench my fists. When I did, the three boys staggered backward, and I thought, for a moment, it was me they were afraid of, but I was wrong. Someone was running up behind me.
I turned around to see Shaun, my oldest brother, running toward the fence. I jumped out of the way, and he crashed into the fence, yelling at the boys.
“Get the fuck out of here!” he yelled, spit coming out of his mouth. He knocked our clothes off the clothesline, he rattled the fence with his hands, pushed his face through it. I could see his mouth dripping with spittle, thrashing until the boys were out of sight. He looked around at our yard, looking for something, anything else to thrash at, to fight, but there were no humans now on the other side of the fence. All we had was the backyard we stood in and the creatures living among us.
He didn’t seem to notice me on the ground, and I was too afraid to say anything. It was afternoon by then. I could tell by the way the sky was darkening and closing in, the restless air and rain clouds approaching. Like most days in Florida, a storm was coming.
Frogs continued to hop all around. A few started to croak, then a few more joined them, one after another until soon that was all I could hear. I covered my ears and looked at Shaun scowling, his fists clenched: this was how he showed his simmering, how he showed his long-building shame and disgust.
“Shaun?” I said. He didn’t or couldn’t hear me.
He shouted up at the sky, and I flinched. He was my brother, in flesh and bones, but beyond that—his carnal yells, his eyes unblinking, his matured rage—I didn’t recognize and couldn’t have copied if I tried. Staring at him, I remember fearing him and yet at the same time loving him—not who he was but what he was: unknowable and unpredictable. I felt the same.
I started to scoot away. He turned around and walked directly back inside, his eyes forward. Once the door slammed behind him, I got up, unsure of where to go. I stared down the length of my backyard, flared bright by the Florida sun, thick rain clouds looming. The white kids had been chased off and things were supposed to be safe now. But they weren’t. Everything around me seemed to know this—flies buzzed through the air; birds squawked on the powerlines and trees; the AC unit rumbled; the wind knocked the slimy, green water against the pool’s edges; and frogs, hundreds of frogs, croaked.
Suddenly, I heard screams. They were coming from inside my house. I looked for somewhere to run and hide. To the left stood our white shed, locked. Behind it, our chain-link fence, too high to climb. To the right was the screened-in patio, a thin boundary of mesh, too close to the screams. So I scurried into the palmetto bushes.
I felt the wet blades of grass against my legs and feet. Dragonflies hummed around my head, and I swatted them away. Sweat ran down my back, into my shorts. The air was thick, slow, unmoving. I had to pee. I wanted to go inside my home more than I ever had before, but I could hear metal banging, furniture moving from inside. I pulled my legs in tight and buried my chin between my knees. I could feel my heart knocking in my chest.
The screened door swung open, banging against the wall. When I pulled back the leaves, I saw Shaun with a steak knife in his hand. He looked around, sweating through his white tank top, the sun shining on his oily, white skin. His eyes were wild but focused. He followed the flight of each hop the frogs made. He watched a few of them, closely, intently. It couldn’t have been more than a few moments, but the world in front of me and what I felt inside me—my heart thumping hard inside my boyish chest, and my backyard seen through my child eyes—stood at their thresholds, on the brink of violently spilling over.
Which they did.
As a frog landed back on the ground, my brother, finally, lost it. He snatched the frog into his hand, its body squirming in his grasp. And I watched him. I watched him drive the knife right into the frog’s stomach. I watched the frog go from seemingly, endlessly animate—hopping and hopping through the air, croaking all day long—to abruptly lifeless in my brother’s hand. Then he stabbed another frog to death, into the ground. I watched each stab start by his head and followed its descent down into the ground until he had finished, and the frog lay there, motionless, and he looked up again, hungry, his eyes scanning the yard, his hands sifting through the grass before getting down onto both knees, rummaging for another frog to pin down and stab—one, two, three times to death—while the frogs’ ribbiting grew louder and louder as he killed as many as he could. Each time he did, I dug my toes and butt deeper into the dirt, trying to disappear. But I couldn’t. I sat there, watching, one killing after the another, until the grass was littered with frog bodies—their legs splayed in different directions, their tongues hanging out, their eyes glazed over.
Watching, something came over me. My heart was still thumping, but my face and hands and legs calmed. I crouched out, slightly, from the bushes. I moved closer. This is my backyard, I thought. I had learned about the word death in church, but now it was in front of me, in my home. I wanted to see and feel death up close in my kingdom. I wanted to hold death in my hands so that I could feel how familiar it felt to the life I had.
Shaun looked up in my direction, and I froze. He raised the knife up in the air, wound it back past his head. He threw the knife—and I ducked to ground. When I looked up, I saw to the left of me another frog, its body hung from the white shed, impaled by the knife. A small slither of guts dribbled down to the grass. Its mouth hung open, just like mine; my body unmoving, just like the frog: both of us sharing the same land for life and death.
I couldn’t say much as to what made those frogs more of a creature than I was. The boundary between us seemed as thin as living and dying.
• •
A week later, I was baptized. I stared down the aisle of the brown, carpeted floor. Wooden pews lined both sides, stained-glass windows all around. I stood dressed in my best clothes: black dress pants, black shoes, and a white, collared shirt. My hands and nails and feet had been scrubbed clean. The cathedral was empty, not a person there as far as I could see. It was midday, sunlight waded in through the roof windows. This, I had been told, was God’s home.
He is always watching, my mother had told me. I looked up toward the altar: Jesus’s eyes were faced down toward the ground. So I did the same.
The priest, with his clergy behind him, guided my sister and me up toward the altar. His white robes hung just above the ground. I kept my eyes down, looking at my dress shoes. We walked down the aisle and up the steps onto the altar. I felt the priest’s hand grasp my shoulder.
“Estas bien?” he asked me, his voice low. I looked up at him, his thin-framed glasses and balding white hair. I nodded, and he patted me on the head.
He led us to the baptistry. My sister, a year older than I, went first.
She walked confidently up to the pool. She stood up straight as the priest said his words. The two of us, through the grace of the Catholic Church, were about to be saved. We were, through ritual, about to become better humans. But what’s clear to me now, and was undeniable in that moment, was how all I could think about was not my baptism in this church and what it meant but the one I had already received in my backyard. If guilt was sin, then I felt it inside me and yearned for the grace of God above me. But I had been looking in the wrong direction. I had been looking up to the sky for how to be human when the world in front of me held the answers. If God’s grace was anywhere, it was in my backyard.
Our pastor moved my sister to the edge, and she leaned forward as if ready to dive in completely. He grabbed her by the back of her head and plunged her face first into the water—one, two, three seconds—before pulling her back up. She stood wide-eyed, gasping for breath, her wet hair sticking to the sides of her face. Then she smiled, satisfied. She had been saved. She’d received God’s grace. It was my turn.
I stood at the edge of the small pool. The water was perfectly clear. I could see my reflection. The priest pushed me forward, gently. Without thinking, my body resisted. My shoulders stiffened, and I jerked my head away. He stopped, and I heard him speak quietly to the clergyman next to him. He patted my shoulders, reassuring me. He leaned me over the pool, then he spoke a few words. I felt his hand clasp onto the back of my skull. He pushed my head down. Again, I resisted, but his hand remained firm. I was face to face with my reflection, with the contours of myself—of what I was and what I was becoming. I was a creature. My grace lay in soaking in all that life had to offer. There was no way around it: the only way was to plunge in.