Natalia García Freire

Trans. by Michelle Mirabella

CHESS PIECE

She’s got a broken body. A foot on the rocking chair, a hand that, from where she’s looking, appears to be cleaning the mirror in the hallway. No sign of the other hand. Only her head and torso are still together, and she rocks like a turtle, like a small child, an armless child, she thinks, a legless child. Speaking of the legs, where have they gotten off to? She spots the other foot outside the closet. And that thing peeking out from under the bed? Perhaps that’s her leg, or an elbow, because she doesn’t recall her knee being skinny like that, like an ostrich. Although ostriches have two, she thinks, two knees. How is it that I can memorize all this nonsense and yet be lying here stiff as a log? She chuckles—quietly, because she hears him off somewhere walking around.

“Are you going to just keep lying there?” he asks her.

We don’t know where he is. His voice is coming from all different directions. Sometimes that happens to them; he talks in the kitchen, and to her it sounds as if he were talking on the balcony or in the laundry room, as if he were everywhere, like an omnipresent god watching over her. He’s always watching over her. His name is Dixon, and he’s talking to her nonstop, about the doctor and exercise and something about her mother, who he always brings up in times like these.

“I’ll go see him tomorrow, I promise,” she says. “Now, do me a favor and pass me a leg.”

“You said you’d do it today. Anyway, why should I pass you a leg if you’re not going to get up?”

“It’s strange. I feel like they’re there, just below my waist, but I can’t see them. It makes me feel . . . well, you know, like I’m losing it.”

“You can’t be doing this every time you don’t want to go.” “I don’t do it on purpose.”

Dixon finally appears, closes the bedroom door, and heads straight to the foot on the rocking chair. He looks at its poorly cut toenails, feeling a massive callus on the heel. But the foot is slender, fine. That’s something he used to like, that he only needed one hand to catch it, like catching a bird, and that it was always cold.

“You know what I’d like?” she says.

He’s still looking around and finds an arm in the dirty laundry basket. When he picks it up there’s a pair of her pink-stained underwear dangling from the limb, stained from years of use because she doesn’t like to buy new clothes, they make her feel bad, for some reason he can’t remember anymore, but that has to do with birds, everything has to do with birds. He carries it over to her and places it where it should be, stuck to her shoulder, although he’s sure it’s the wrong shoulder, because it looks broken, twisted. . .strange.

“To go look at baby chicks. They have just one, very small, tooth. Can you picture it? They use it to hatch. I read it somewhere. Something like that could make me feel better. You know, with all this thinking about the other, otherness, the world out there. I think if I lived on a farm this wouldn’t happen to me.”

“You could live on Mars, and you’d still be incapable of seeing beyond yourself. I bet Mars would make you think about the scabs your father left you with when you were little, and then you’d cry.”

He’s placing her arms correctly, on their proper sides, when he says this. And when he mentions her father, he feels a slight shake in his newly sweaty hands.

“It’s just that you’re not able to escape from yourself.” “My limbs would beg to differ.”

“ . . . ”

“It’s a joke. At least now I can laugh at myself.”

“Well that’s the worst part. When you do that, you have a way of pitying yourself that gives me half a mind to shoot you just to do you a favor.”

Her arms are attached now, and she moves around with them, swinging back and forth, as if she were amused by having been turned into a carnival attraction. And to look under the bed, she throws herself backwards onto the floor and rolls until reaching what is clearly a leg. When she comes out from under the bed, she’s almost complete; she has two arms and a leg and hops around on the one looking for the other, until she falls to the ground. It’s as if she were falling in slow motion and she stays there on the floor maimed, wrecked.

“I am vertical, dear, but I would rather be horizontal” she says. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s not me, it’s Sylvia Plath.”

“Suicidal poets—no, no thanks.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry, Dixon! It’s not your fault that you’re superior morally, emotionally, and even physically speaking.”

“You see? There you go again. Self-pity.”

When she’s finally complete, she moves closer to him and takes his hand. He’s now sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s looking increasingly haggard with those under-eye bags, and if she’s being honest, she must say he’s looking thinner too. He doesn’t look happy, that’s for sure. But at least he’s, she doesn’t know how to say it without it sounding strange, compact.

“I think you need a hug, Dixon. Come here.”

She squeezes him too much. More than a hug, it’s torture, but he lets her until one of the arms loses strength and falls to the floor. And when he pulls away, all the limbs are wandering off again. This time, he doesn’t say a thing to her; he doesn’t pick them up or help her get up. He just backs away staring at that motionless torso—handless, armless, like a chess piece, so white. And she speaks, but he can’t hear, he just watches her mouth moving, but then promptly ignores it, because now all he can see is just that: a chess piece, almost too beautiful, a totem, something he wants to place in his pocket and stroke in times like these, when he wants to cry, or slam himself against a wall and explode.

Natalia García Freire, born in Cuenca, Ecuador, holds an MA in Narrative Writing from La Escuela de Escritores de Madrid, where she is a virtual creative writing teacher. She is the author of two novels: You Brought the Wind with You and This World Does Not Belong to Us, which has been translated into French, Italian, Turkish, Danish, and English. She lives in Ecuador, has a garden and a cat, and she writes.

Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish to English literary translator whose work appears in World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Firmament, the Arkansas International, and elsewhere. Other translations are forthcoming in a HarperCollins anthology. She is a graduate of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. You can find out more at www.michellemirabella.com and follow her on Twitter as @MirabellaM_.