La Virgen de Guadalupe

I was back home for summer break and all around the pool all day, everyday, were the kids from the neighborhood, the nieces and nephews, grandchildren to my parents. The summer was awash in hazy blue chlorine-ness. Having made my first paycheck at the radio station night gig, and having made a pact with Richie that we would get tatoos once we had the money and had passed final exams, we were off on the third week of break around midnight to the parlor where I got the multi-colored Virgen de Guadalupe stamped on my right shoulder – just like the ones you see on the sides of those tall, glass devotional candles. Back at home Mom was not so excited about this, especially about fact that it poked out of the bottom of the average short-sleeve shirt. She still helped me apply the salve and at least on one occasion she noted, “Well, at least it is pretty.”

There was laughing, swimming and singing from the little tots all the days, and at night I would meet up with the high school friends for dinner and the occasional drink sneak, reporting to the station at shortly before midnight and spinning records (because playing CDs, whereas more truthful, just doesn’t sound as good) until around sunrise.
Occasionally, Whitney would come by after she closed at the restaurant and we would talk about what was, and could of been between me and her. One time she tried to kiss me on the lips, and with an open mouth, before she left – or was it the other way around? I can’t really remember the sequence of events now, but there was something of an intmate moment sparked between us, originator unknown.
Then it happened. It was three days before I was to go back to school and it was the day after my last gig at the radio station. We were all out by the pool. The neighborhood kids had all gone home, so that left me, mom and dad, my brother and sister-in-law and my nieces and nephew. The kids were playing in the shallow end and dad was fixing cocktails and slipping one to me for every three he allowed himself. We were getting ready to start up the grill and make porkchops for dinner, when I noticed that the pool was sinking.
I assure you that this is true. The pool was sinking into the ground. It was fracturing around the edges and detaching itself from the surrounding concrete patio and sinking. As it sank a fiery red glow appeared in the fractures and I watched it a full 5 minutes before calling it to the attention of anyone else. Even the kids in the pool didn’t seem to notice it. Dad was only fixing me vodka tonics, which I was used to, so I was sure that my eyes were not fooling me, that this was real.
Then my brother noticed and went to get the kids out of the pool. As he approached, the incresingly red breach between concrete and pool widened, he had to to do a full strained straddle over it to grab each one of the kids and pull them out.
Then came smoke and gurgles, sounds that Richie’s stomach would make after going to Burrito Hut #4. Then from the breach came oozing and bubbling lava, just like what I had seen on those Discovery Channel documentaries about the volcanoes in Hawaii. But, I mean, this was a fucking pool, man! The smoke and bubbles increased and under the patio, where we are all still just sitting watching the pool sink into the earth, tremors could be felt. The tremors turned to full-blown shakes, and everything became a bit blurry and wavey, the way that my computer screen looks when I have my electric toothbrush in my mouth.
THen came the crack, the sound, and I can focus again, but only on one thing… the floating, slow motion, globule of lava that is coming for me. I turn left in slow motion as well, to avoid this steamy projectile when it hits me. I mean it really hits me. Right on the shoulder, my right shoulder, right on the Virgen de Guadalupe, and I fell to the concrete. Laying there, listenening to my skin sizzle, I look and the pool is completely gone now. The smoke has cleared. My father brings the fire extinguisher and tries to put out my sizzling shoulder. I look down at it for the first time and all that is recognizable as shoulder, or anything, is her shrouded head with eyes looking toward the ground.