A Guide to Childrearing
by Andrew Luis Hurtado-Ramirez
Grandpa used to keep a machete in his old pickup, between his seat and the cup holder.
He kept a few guns in the closet, letting me hold them when my mom wasn’t home.
On Saturday mornings, at the swap meet with grandpa, he’d usually get me
1. a coffee
2. a tamale
3. another toy
4. another knife
My dad liked to tease me with his belt, readying it in place with a snap. The sound it made froze
you there, not knowing where the fun began or when it would end.
At 5, I threw sand at my classmate’s face as play. The memory is faded now,
and I’m not sure if I apologized. It’s no matter, he kept his head down after that.
I slid under my parents’ bed, using the rails of the frame above me to shuffle further,
farther into its shadow. In the midst of some prayer, someone grabbed my ankle, dragging me
out, back into the light. Looking up at my parents—a black leather belt, a head of red-tempered hair—
Sometimes saying sorry doesn’t change a thing.
There were many times I understood why, like when I was 13 talking back to my mom.
Her soft hands
like lightning,
At 6, I beat a lizard to death with a foam baseball bat in the backyard. There was
nothing dangerous about it, it was a cute lizard. But I kept swinging. Once the twitching
stopped, I crouched down and hung over it, looking at the purple stain on my bat and
back at the lizard, back and forth, again and again.