I Believed in a God, Once
And then mankind ruined everything
We’re in Mexico.
My skin is streaked red with burn and I’m feasting on club sandwiches. We’re seniors in college and drunk in Acapulco. We sport our Señor Frogs t-shirts without irony. I yell solamente cheese to no one in particular and everyone laughs. At night, we climb into VW bugs strewn with purple blinking lights and house music and there are men outside pacing the streets carrying machine guns. I’m standing next to a man who could’ve been my age carrying a gun and I don’t know what to do with this knowledge so I laugh and laugh until we’re back in the hallway of our hotel and I’m lying on the carpet unsure of how I arrived on the floor.
There are five of us. During the day we get the idea of going out into the ocean in an inflatable raft. It’s small and we’re accompanied by a man in a small boat. Alisa, Liz, and I are the only ones who speak Spanish so we negotiate the ride out to sea. The men are concerned because the raft fits four. We point to Deirdre and say she’s so skinny she’s half a person so we’re 4.5 and what’s the big deal anyway?
The men motor us out to sea because we’re white women with money.
We ride fast and feel the spray of water on our faces and we never imagined a spring so perfect, so clean and beautiful and we’re…
