unshaped

my sister says our mother never wears dresses with zippers because her crazy can’t be confined. i first noticed when my mother caught me drawing shapes on the living room carpet with licorice lipstick—her face a loud polaroid, clear & blank, & then rainbowed—she pushed my face into the ground like a dog’s, smeared me red, picked me up, dragged me to her closet by my ear, made me sit in the dark for eight hours. i remember my head purring owwwwwww & waiting for the sun to break up in the sky—for the small tangerine light under the door to fade into blue jam—so my mother would free me. to pass the time, i pushed clothes off hangers & tried on some of my mom’s sundresses: even though none of them fit me, they made me believe i could be unshaped, a river in a piece of clothing. 

 flor de llamas

i once saw in a movie hell the color of heartburn. it didn’t seem that scary—the world was a fleshy sphincter that would beige big & shrivel bloody. a sight you could escape. all you had to do was close your eyes & dream: skinny-dip into an ice-cold coca-cola creek, float belly-up as the moon denims into the sky, bubble up boys from the deep depths of blue. imagine them filling you in with bright, soft explosions. you could dream up just about anything, or at least that’s what i thought until i watched a resurrection story on tv, from a man who claimed he’d visited the devil’s land after being pronounced dead. almost tenderly, he described hell as a field of flowers—flores de llamas everywhere, as far as the eye could see. even when you closed your eyes. & that’s how i picture hell now, & now that’s where most people think you are after killing yourself. in a field on fire, surrounded by a hexed beauty you can’t escape, even if you shut your eyes.

 JJ Peña (he/they) is a queer, burrito-blooded writer living & existing in El Paso, Texas. JJ’s work is included in the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology & Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions (2020). JJ’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.