Quarter past eleven on the Jubilee

My Abuela's gray shoes are tight and her ankles bilge over the sides, great fresh sausages encased in knee high hose two shades lighter than her skin. They roll down forming hula-hoops of mesh on her calves. It is quarter past eleven and we are on the tube with lights flashing staccato across weary faces of travelers, foreign moons like mine, but still so strange to me. I touch Abuela's hair as it lifts from her scalp. The strands black and silver spider legs crawling in the air. I see myself in the glass across the aisle and smile at my reflection until the corners of my eyes are squinty. Abuela tucks my hair from my face and pinches my cheek softly. I lean into her with a secret whisper in our own language that I do not want to share with the others. Her apron smells of cleaning products and seems a safe place to harbor them. She straightens my favorite red coat with the white flowers, and pulls the phone from her old leather purse to show me its electric blue screen full of games and music and numbers. It plays our song and we share a small laughter into our hands, brown of earth and heritage, hands that plant the seeds of our mighty existences into the rich topsoil, in a place so far from home. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by The Toronto Quarterly