>> I hope I don't strangle myself here.
[? It's easy ?] to walk around with me.
The other story that's in New Chicana, Chicano writing is called Ghost Trap.
A woman was building a ghost trap to catch the ghost of her marido, who had recently died.
She wanted to keep him from coming into her house.
At first, she had been devastated by his death.
She had thrown herself into the grave, on top of his coffin,
shrieking ¡Ay, viejito, por qué me dejaste!
Yo te quería tanto and wailing like la llorona, the ghost woman who wandered in the dark.
She would wake in the middle of the night in a sweat, turn to him to share a dream
or a fear and find him not there.
Feeling like a ghost, she would walk from room to room at night thinking about him
and feeling numb and decepcionada.
Gradually her loneliness soured and turned into anger at his desertion.
One night, the second week after his death, despertó to find him,
or rather his ghost, in bed with her.
¡Viejo! She cried out, smiling for the first time since his death.
But suddenly she frowned and felt fear squeeze her corazón.
Durante el día, he would follow her around the house into the backyard.
However, he would never go beyond the front gate when she left to do her mandados.
She began to spend more time away from the house.
She realized that she missed her solitude.
Instead of making her feel wanted and protected, as his hovering presence had before his death,
his constant hovering now stifled her.
Viejo, why do you keep coming back every night?
Did you leave something unfinished?
Is there some business you want to complete?
Tell me. Yo te ayudo a hacerlo.
¡Vieja! ¡Viejita linda!
Bring me clean clothes, he said to her in a wisp of a whisper.
Bah, estás muerto.
¿Para qué necesitas ropa?
She whispered back.
His repeated requests would seem to get louder and louder.
Finally drove her to the closet, of course his clothes were missing.
She'd given them away.
Now she would have to go into the shop to buy men's things and face the look of censure
in the shopkeeper's face and how fast she had replaced her marido con otro hombre.
¡Vieja! ¡Vieja!
Fix me some dinner, he said in a harsh mutter.
Le hizo carnitas, his favorite dish and set it on the table, but a ghost can't eat.
So the comida would sit on the table gathering moscas.
You know what moscas are?
Flies. ¡Vieja!
¡Viejita linda!
Bring me una cerveza.
Oh, she would go to the market to get the beer.
La gente began to talk about how her grief had driven her to drink.
She would pull the lid and place the can of beer en la mesa by his chair.
You know I only drink Dos Equis, he growled.
The beer would go flat.
She was tempted to drink his cerveza to alleviate her increasing irritation.
Tending to his ghost seemed to take all her time.
She began to resent the washing and cooking and trimming his hair
and toenails when the asshole had been alive.
Just when she thought herself free el pendejo was back and more trouble now that he was dead.
Her only consolation was that she didn't have to wash his smelly, his smelly,
his smelly calcetines and dirty underwear.
But her two-week-old vida ya no era suya and she wanted it back.
How could she stop her marido muerto from returning?
One day inspiration brought a smile to her face.
She made a little model of her house with popsicle sticks and glue and placed it
in a safe spot halfway between his grave in the nearby cemetery,
in the nearby Campo Santo and her home.
She had heard that ghosts don't have a sense of perspective.
Rocking back and forth, her chair creaked on the porch as she waited for el espanto
to enter the model house thinking it was the real one.
That night, she did not awaken.
In the morning, cuando despertó, she turned towards the site
where su viejo had been sleeping the past 30 years.
His ghost was not there nor was he there for the following night.
She sat up waiting for him, worrying about what to do with a ghost house.
Suppose someone turn the casita --
Found la casita and accidentally opened the door and let the ghost out.
Conceivably some element of nature, a strong wind or fire could destroy the flimsy cage
and her dead husband could get out.
The tiny house was too fragile to be buried, the earth would crush it and the ghost would escape.
She had to put it somewhere safe and out of the reach of others.
Through several days of deliberation, she carefully carried the ghost trap into her house
and placed it under the bed, where most of his nieces and nephews could not find it.
That night a voice woke her up.
It called out, no longer whispering, ¡Vieja!
¡Vieja! Tú todavía estás buenísima.
¡Ándale, déjame probar ese cuerpazo!
The pisser was back.
She thought, she felt his body stirring under the bed covers.
Half dreaming, half awake, she pushed him away saying ¡Vete, viejo aguado!
But she kept climbing on top of her.
All night, she refused to open her legs to him.
Next morning she woke with deep bruises down the corners of her mouth and bruises
on her breasts, arms and inner thighs.
She peered under la cama and saw that the door of the casita was open.
She walked from room to room looking for el pinche desgraciado, and muttering to herself,
how am I going to get rid of that fucker?
She considered going to the local curandera and asking her to drive his soul into el pozo.
Better yet, to hell.
Or she could look through the Yellow Pages to find a ghostbuster.
¡Ah, no!
If her loneliness had summoned him, her anger would drive him away.
She'd do it herself with words and curses.
She decided to be prepared, should her words fail.
That night she plugged in the vacuum cleaner and put it by her bed --
-- she tugged on two of her sturdiest corsets, several pairs of pants and three shirts,
turned off the lights, got into bed and waited.
She jumped out of bed, fetched her heavy iron skillet and hid it under the bed covers,
just in case he'd taken on more substance than the vacuum could handle.
Come on, cabrón.
Hijo de la chingada, ven.
Vente, pendejo, she said under her breath.
And here is the gloss.
The glossary, my short for glossary.
Marido is husband.
La llorona is the Weeping Woman.
Decepcionada means disillusioned.
Viejo is old man.
Espanto is a ghost.
Casita is a little house.
Moscas is flies.
Calcetines is socks.
Cama is bed.
Viejo aguado is a man who is sexually wasted, who is impotent.
This is my concession to non-Spanish speakers or non-Chicano Spanish speakers.
This book will have a gloss at the end of the book.
Gracias. I'm so surprised, people clapping and I'm not even finished.