Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera Read Free Book Online Page B

never had she known a Happy Family of the sort people talked about, the sort so many swore to defend; all of them were more than just one thing, or they were all the same thing but in completely different ways: none were only fun-loving or solely stingy, and the stories that made any two laugh had nothing in common.
    She’d seen people who’d run off to save their families and others who’d run off to be saved from them. Families full of endless table chat as easygoing as families that loved each other without words. (In hers there were just three women right now. Her heart skipped a beat when she thought of her little sister; it only started back up when she concluded that, like her, she’d know how to take care of herself.)
    Plus, all families had started off in some mysterious way: to repopulate the earth, or by accident, or by force, or out of boredom; and it’s all a mystery what each will become. One time she’d been in the middle of an argument between sweethearts. The woman had run to the switchboard, planted herself behind Makina and stood there responding to each of the man’s grievances; it was sheer pigheadedness till Makina began to rephrase their respective complaints: You like my cousin better, you can keep her, She says that was low, you getting with her cousin, What are you bitching about? I’m the same cat I was when you met me, He says he’s acting like the man you wanted him to be, Oh, then me too, so don’t get in my face cause I already knew that friend of yours, She says what’s good for the gander is good for the goose, But you’d never done nothing with him before and me and your cousin was an item, He says that’s apples and oranges, I don’t care if you was an item back in the day, but I damn sure care if you still are, She says to stop playing dumb, It was just one kiss, the last one, He says they were saying goodbye, Oh, right, then mine was a goodbye, too, She says why can’t she if you’re still messing around, I’m not saying you can’t, but it bugged me when everyone found out, He says he’s not that jealous but you shouldn’t be so brazen. Then they both shut up and Makina concluded I think you’re both saying that the both of you could be more discreet. For a while after that, every time she bumped into them they’d thank her for getting them back together. Then she didn’t see them anymore.
    On her way to the army base Makina passed a building whose steps were crowded with people holding multicolored flags; her excitement and hurry having subsided, she stopped to see what it was about. There were couples holding hands lining up to see a very solemn man who said something to them and after he said it everyone cried and there was rice and clapping and rejoicing galore. They were getting married. Makina was so dazzled by the beauty of the ceremony that she didn’t at first notice that the couples were either men or women but not men and women, and on realizing it she felt moved by how many tears were being shed, like flowers from their eyes, over how hard it had been to get there, and she wished that the people she’d known in the same situation could have been that happy. What she couldn’t understand was why the ring, the official, the godparents mattered so. Makina had admired the nerve of her friends who were that way inclined, compared to the tedious smugness of so-called normal marriages; she’d conveyed secret messages, lent her home for the loving that could not speak its name and her clothes for liberation parades. She’d witnessed other ways to love … and now they were acting just the same. She felt slightly let down but then said to herself, what did she know. It must be, she thought, that they know other marriages, good ones where people don’t split up, where fathers don’t leave and they each keep speaking to the other. That must be why they’re so happy, and don’t mind imitating people who’ve always despised them. Or perhaps they just want the