Free Troika by Adam Pelzman

turned the knob. Before him stood Julian in his frayed church suit, his face wet, his hair combed, a satchel over his shoulder. “Come in, son,” he said to the boy. “We have much work to do.”

FOR YOU AND YOUR GOD
    T here’s an old Colombian who lives across the way from me and my mother in Miami, Old Pepe’s his name, and he’s a got a little cottage with a tin roof and a yard in the back with lots of flowers. There’s birds-of-paradise, rosebushes, peonies and lilacs, and boy do I love the smell of those flowers, especially after a hard rain when the sun comes out, the ground is moist and the stems are drooping from the weight of the water.
    He’s also got dozens of birds, bright-colored parrots from all over the world, but mostly from Latin America. Sometimes they’re all together in the little shed and sometimes lined up tight on the branch like the bottles behind the bar at Paris Nights, and sometimes, when he reaches deep into a burlap bag and grabs a fistful of seed, you see them flapping, flying, dancing around in a big cloud of rainbow colors.
    If you told me that Pepe’s a hundred and fifty I wouldn’t besurprised at all, ’cause not only does he look every bit that old, but he’s got the smarts of a man who’s lived for hundreds of years, seen everything and forgotten nothing. Pepe’s an Indian, a Guambiano from the south of Colombia in a state called Cauca, which is in the Andes and it’s not far from the border with Ecuador. And the only reason I know that is not ’cause I’ve been to Colombia, but ’cause I looked it up in an atlas that my dad gave me for one of my birthdays.
    Of course I’d love to go to Colombia, especially to Cartagena, ’cause Gabriel García Márquez is my favorite writer and if Cartagena is only half as beautiful as the way he describes it then I must see it, stroll through those plazas and churches and smell the flowers. And maybe even fall in love there, ’cause could there be a more beautiful place to fall in love than Cartagena, a more romantic place in the entire world for a man and a woman to fall in love?
    The Guambianos make me laugh, so funny, so short and dark-skinned with broad noses and thick black hair, and the sweetest thing about them is how they dress. They wear these colorful ponchos, bright blue with red-and-white piping, stringy scarves, sometimes white, sometimes red. And then there’s the hats! Oh, how I love those hats, old-fashioned black bowler hats, and I’ve got no idea how they came to wearing them. Indians from the jungle and they wear formal black hats like they’re going out to the theater in London a hundred years ago. And that’s how Pepe dresses. Doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold, cloudy or a lot of sun, rain, wind, he puts on his poncho, his scarf and his bowler hat and tends to his birds.
    One time when I’m little I forget my key and get locked out of my house. It’s raining and Old Pepe sees me peering through the crack in my back door and trying to wedge open the window by thekitchen. He invites me inside and makes me a cup of tea. He gives me a fashion magazine to read, says you just stay here until your parents get home. So I open the magazine and all the photos have girls, pretty girls, dressed the way my mom dressed when she first met my dad, and I’m confused and look at the date on the cover. Turns out, the magazine’s twenty years old and I wonder where he got it and why he keeps it after all these years.
    I sit in Pepe’s living room, flipping through the magazine, and the pages are all stiff and wrinkly ’cause it’s old and the air in Miami is so humid that it turns a magazine like this into a swollen, puffy thing that doesn’t lie flat. I sit on the couch, tap my feet on the floor, though I can barely reach. I pray that my parents get home soon. It’s a mystery to me, this house, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been inside. I look around, and on the wall not far from where I’m sitting is an