Free Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa Page B

while gulls dive-bombed from the darkness of the underpass, falling wing-tucked toward the water. And Victor on a paint-splattered couch eating a crust of bread and reading and watching and loving her.
    And this was why he had traveled; this was the disappointment he felt when he looked in the guidebook and trooped off with his pack to see another crumbling ruin, blurry-headed in the noonday sun. He traveled, in some way, to discover who he was, to recognize himself in the world because, a half-black brown boy, not-quite-white, he did not see it. But what he found was the inside of some empty ruin, cool and dim, and outside in the sun, ragged human shapes littered along the path like leaves.
    The year she died Victor did serious time among the books. He schooled himself from the boxes. He liked to read. He liked crashing down there in the basement with the smell of concrete and earth, liked reading his mother’s old books, liked the idea that he had inherited more than his dark skin and dark hair from the woman who disappeared.
    Fanon, Freire, Guevara. James Baldwin and bell hooks. There was poetry by Ernesto Cardenal and Oscar Romero. John Berger. A set of strange novels called Memory of Fire —part journalism, part fiction, part mystic trance—by a Uruguayan writer named Eduardo Galeano.
    Sometimes, late into the night, he could swear he felt something like his mother’s presence among the books—some sense of her touch in the smell of ink and paper, the stained pages, the occasional fingerprint smudged with paint. It was almost as if she had never left.
    Victor, of course, never failed to fire a monster joint on these underground missions. And there he would sit, reading. He liked how those books made him feel, the books and the weed, his brain humming with knowledge, an odd and lovely sort of expansion feeling these threads of words that stretched across continents and decades, a sort of feeling that he, too, was stretched and flattened, his brain spread like a map across the world as if sending tendrils of connection creeping out to places and people far removed.
    He felt somehow close to his mother in these moments. As if she were the one speaking to him. And for a moment the loneliness that was always with him left him alone. It was a feeling of indeterminate shape, sometimes resembling a faucet that would not stop and the drain which caught the water, other times a boat made of newspaper folds turning slowly in a rain-soaked gutter, but that strange new knowledge of the world brought home by the boxes and the books pushed it a step back. Gave him some room to breathe. After all, what could be better, Victor thought in his basement lair, than the words of dead or distant teachers for a boy with a dead mother?
    That is, until the day his father (he never once, not until this day, thought of him as his stepfather, or his adopted father) descended the stairs and found him with the boxes open and a bong smoking in his lap. He lifted his head, and smiled, red-eyed and raw.
    His father, great leader that he was, had smashed the bong against the concrete floor. Shards of purple glass everywhere. He had nearly broken Victor’s arm, so forcefully had he twisted it behind his back and marched him up the stairs. And later that night, Victor in his room had watched through the window as his father—his sweet dear daddy—had dragged the boxes of books into the backyard, made a pyramid as tall as a man, doused them in gasoline, sloshing and cursing, and had his dad been crying as he cursed and stumbled, Victor didn’t know. His father lit a match and threw it toward the pile, and the books went up in flame, the light playing orange and yellow against the house, against his father’s swaying body, against Victor’s thin face as it hung in the window like some strange reflection of the moon in a mud puddle, his father seeing his face there, saying, shouting up to the window, “This, this, this. This is what happens when you