American Sun
-
Captain Canada
- Posts: 4735
- Joined: 01 Dec 2018, 00:15
American Sun
Get Caine getting re-arrested scene and Mireya ending up pregnant gonna hit the streets like a pandemic.
American Sun
Hat in hand for them schollies mode activated.
better get on that grant grind though
W ishing such bad juju on our guy Caine????Captain Canada wrote: ↑16 Sep 2025, 13:57Get Caine getting re-arrested scene and Mireya ending up pregnant gonna hit the streets like a pandemic.
Also, sir, it was in the narrative that Mireya has an IUD. What you calling for immaculate conception? And I feel like you don't mean pregnant by Caine because y'all ain't slick. 
American Sun
Sou Tab San Manje
The porch boards had a soft give in the middle where everybody stepped. Caine settled in that spot anyway, hoodie up, elbows on his knees, breath looping pale in the cool air. The courtyard looked different now that the trees had started letting go. Leaves gathered in the corners like brown hands, dry enough to talk when the wind pushed them.
Camila made her own weather in the pile by the steps. She kicked and laughed and then got serious, kneeling to choose. Every so often she ran to him with her offering, small palm open—this leaf heart shaped, this rock with a stripe like a road. She lingered against his shin long enough to feel the warmth through denim, then skipped back to the pile, two steps, three, stopping to look over her shoulder to make sure he stayed put.
“Go on,” he told her the first time, and she went. She did not stop checking.
Fall in New Orleans did not bite like the places he had seen on TV. It slid in thin and patient. A neighbor’s radio drifted up a floor and then fell quiet. Somewhere far off, a siren tested its throat and decided against singing. The laundry room vent breathed a mix of bleach and old heat into the air. He could taste salt in it.
He rubbed his hands once and felt the sting where a cut had gone soft at the edges. The hood muffled the world just enough to make his thoughts sound like they belonged to him. He reached into the pocket and brought out the small notebook, the cheap spiral with bent corners that always found its way back to him. He turned past pages where his writing leaned right, past a list of shoes to buy next year that he knew he would not, past a note he had written at practice about a route he wanted to try. He found a blank page and smoothed the crease with his palm.
The pen he kept tucked inside the spiral clicked. He set the notebook on his thigh. The page took the words in a groove that felt worn by the hands of the men in his family, even the ones who had never written anything down.
No matter what I make of myself, he wrote, no matter what jersey hangs in somebody’s locker with my name stitched small, this is it. This right here. You. You are the greatest thing I ever did.
He sat with it a second. He kept the sentences short. The letters linked and stood alone by turns. He dated the page and put a small star by it the way he did when it mattered more than usual. He thought about the first time he saw her heart on a grainy sonogram and how the sound had been a train with nowhere to be but here. He blinked and let the picture pass.
Camila crashed through leaves and found a little piece of sky that had fallen, a candy wrapper so clean it looked new. She brought it to him at a run.
He held out his hand. “Not that one, mamas.”
She handed it over like a secret and let him slip it into his pocket. Then she leaned her head against his knee for three beats he counted and went back to work, kicking until a new cloud of brittle color rose and rained down.
He closed the notebook and tapped it against his thigh once to make the words settle. The spiral caught on a stray thread and tugged it loose. He tucked the notebook away and pressed the thread down. His palm came away warm.
“Camila,” he called. “Ven aquí, mi vida.”
She spun like she knew her name was a song. The bow in her hair had gone crooked in the play and one curl had escaped to draw a lazy line across her cheek.
He patted his knee and she came, small sneakers scuffing, cheeks pink, eyes bright. She leaned her little weight into him and made a soft sound, not a word, just a content breath that said she knew his shape.
“I love you,” he said. “You know that?”
She nodded big, serious as church. “Love you too, Daddy.”
He felt it hit him all the way through. Some days the words rolled past him like traffic. Today they set in place like a brick. He slid his palm over her hair. The curl lifted and fell under his hand.
“Go play,” he said. “I’m right here.”
She lifted her face for a kiss and then ran. The pile took her like it had been waiting. She threw herself into it and disappeared up to her shoulders. Then a giggle bubbled up and she popped out smiling, hands full of crushed brown.
He watched the small mechanics of her joy, the way she sorted what was worth showing and what was for keeping and felt the steady pull in his chest that had nothing to do with lungs. He kept one eye on the steps, the instinct that had been with him since he was young, the one that counted doors and faces for danger even when there was none to count. The other stayed on her.
A bus sighed on the street. The courtyard gate yelped when somebody came through and then clanged shut. He did not turn to see. The hoodie held heat at the back of his neck. A line of ants worked the edge of the concrete. He tracked them until they vanished under the stoop.
Camila picked up two rocks and decided against one. She put it in her pocket with authority and trotted back with the other, breath coming in puffs. “Look,” she said, the k turning into a little t.
He took the rock and turned it in his fingers like he was a jeweler. “This one nice,” he said. “Where it go?”
She pointed at his hoodie pocket, the same one holding the notebook, then changed her mind and held out her own pocket. He placed it there like he was hiding treasure. She pressed the pocket flat with her hand and then patted his knee twice the way he patted her back at night.
“Go on,” he said again, softer.
She ran. The sky had gone that color New Orleans knew how to do where it was both bright and tired at once. The leaves made a dry city sound. He let his mind drift to the blank page he would fill when she went down, to the words he would find for the way she looked at him right before she fell asleep, to the promise he kept writing in different shapes—that he would stand where she could see him, even when the world asked him not to.
She found another heart shaped leaf. She looked at it. She looked at him. She started toward the pile and stopped. Her head turned. She checked to make sure he was still where she left him.
He was.
“I’m here,” he said, for her and for himself.
She flashed a grin that filled her whole face and dove back into the leaves. A beat later she looked back again, just to be sure.
The kitchen held a late-October quiet that came from the window propped open a crack and the pot on the back burner going low and steady. The table was cleaned off except for the stacks she’d made. Ones, fives, tens, twenties, each squared with edges lined like she could will the month into behaving. Hundreds on their own island near her elbow. Sara wrote in a cheap notebook with a pencil worn short, the eraser chewed to a pale nub. Due dates. Notes in Spanish and English, shorthand that made sense to no one but her. Light bill. Gas. Hector’s parts for the water heater if he didn’t find them used. Groceries. Detergent. A number for “just in case” that she crossed out and wrote again smaller.
She breathed through her nose and kept counting.
The three hundreds slid out from the tidy stack with a soft whisper. She stood, knees stiff from another day on her feet and dragged the step stool over the tile. It clicked once on a cracked grout line. She climbed, reached above the cabinet’s wood trim for the Virgin Mary figure that lived up where grease turned dust into a film. Mary came down careful in both hands. Sara flipped the smooth base, worried the plastic stopper free with a fingernail, and tugged the folded stash from the hollow. Rubber band. Old receipts wrapped like a skin. She tucked the three hundreds into the fold, pressed it shut, put the stopper back in, and lifted La Virgen into her place. The statue rocked once, then settled.
“Así,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
Back at the table, she took the stack she’d labeled extra, tapped it square against the surface, and slid open the bright macaw statue’s slot. The bird’s paint had chipped under the wing. She fed the bills inside until the belly felt tight.
“Para la casa,” she said, the way her mother said it, the way you said it when you were reminding the air what mattered.
Ziploc bags waited open on the table. She wrote on each with a blue pen. Mortgage. Entergy. Groceries. She portioned money into the plastic, pressed the zippers closed, let the air burp out with a small sigh.
Footsteps came soft down the hall. Saul pushed the door with his shoulder and paused like he’d walked in on a prayer. A slice of hallway light lay across his face before the door swung back. He lifted his chin.
“Oye, tia,” he said, reflex wrong before he corrected himself with a small, embarrassed grin. “Hola, tia, I mean.”
She didn’t tease him for it. “Oye, Sobrino,” Sara said, warmth tucked behind the tired. She finished sealing the last bag. “You eat?”
He shook his head and went to the fridge. The light hit the sill of jars and a leftover foil tray. He pulled a Jarritos and twisted the cap off, glass clinking against the counter. Lime fizz hissed out. He didn’t drink right away. Just watched the table, the statutes of money, the calendar math in Sara’s notebook like it was a language he almost understood.
They let the pot simmer fill the space. Outside, someone’s radio caught a station wrong and faded back to static. A bus sighed two blocks over. The cool coming in through the window carried laundry soap and the faint bleach of the stairwell.
“Caine okay?” Saul asked, voice pitched casual, like asking about the weather might be safer.
Sara nodded once, eyes still on the bags. “Could’ve ended up worse places than his girlfriend’s bed,” she said, a small smile sliding through, irony and resignation meeting in the middle. She stacked the Ziplocs by size, knocked the corners even with the heel of her hand.
Saul turned the bottle in his palm. Condensation ran down and made a clean circle on the counter. He swallowed like the words stuck first, then came out anyway. “I’m sorry about—you know—the gun thing.”
She looked up and really looked at him. The boy who wasn’t a boy anymore. The same mouth from when he was five and hid under tables. The same eyes from last week when he wouldn’t meet hers. She stepped around the chair and touched his cheek with the open gentleness she didn’t spend on many people.
“I think we all have things to be sorry about,” she said softly.
Color rose under the brown of his skin like the heat from the stove had reached him. He nodded, quiet, and finally took a drink.
Sara carried the bags to the drawer by the stove. It stuck the way it always did. She bumped her hip into the cabinet to loosen it, slipped the plastic inside, and pushed the drawer shut with her wrist. The click felt like a small door closing somewhere a little farther down the road.
Saul leaned in the archway and watched her without trying to hide it. “He coming back?” he asked, the words simple and loaded.
She put the step stool away, folded its legs with a snap, and set it between the fridge and the wall. She didn’t turn around when she answered. “Probably not.”
She rinsed her hands at the sink, the water running cold enough to wake her joints. She dried them on the dish towel she’d washed thin and hung back on the oven handle the way she always did.
Sara took the pot off the burner and set it to cool. She turned the clock on the stove back two minutes because it had run fast again. Her shoulder pinched when she reached up to straighten the calendar page. She rolled it once and the knot let go.
She stepped toward the hall and paused in the doorway to the dark. The house felt like it always did at this hour—tired and still and holding.
“Apaga la luz,” she said over her shoulder, voice low, already leaving the room.
The office window glass held a film of dust that no rag ever fully cleared. The light came through thin, a cold strip across the desk where the old keyboard sat crooked. Mireya rubbed her thumb along the trackpad. The spreadsheet held its grid like a stubborn face. Tuition, fees, health compliance, lab kit, parking.
Her bank app glowed on the phone beside the mouse. The total pulsed higher than it had any right to be, padded by envelopes Caine had pressed in her palm with that quiet look that asked nothing and everything. Construction money. The other money. She didn’t separate the bills when she counted. The numbers didn’t care.
Neither did she.
She tucked stray hair behind her ear and moved a hundred from one column to another. The orange cells shifted to yellow. Not solved, but less red. She let the breath she was holding out through her nose. The office hummed with the small sounds of a place that never slept. A compressor somewhere coughed and caught. Diesel upshifted at the gate. Dust lifted and settled again on the sill.
Boot steps came slow across the concrete, heel toe heel. She kept her eyes on the screen.
“Mireyaaa. Mamacita,” Leo sang, voice full of fake sweetness. “I need you to drive me.”
She clicked into the next line and typed a date. “Ask Denise.”
“I might as well drive myself then.” He leaned on the doorjamb like it had been built for him. “Won’t cut your portion this time.”
“Ask Denise,” she said again. Her mouth didn’t move much. The cursor blinked. The phone buzzed with a low battery warning, and she ignored it.
“You don’t gotta do nothing for me not to cut it,” he said. “Scouts’ honor.”
He crossed his heart with two fingers and threw up a crooked salute like he’d ever worn a uniform for anything but court.
Mireya stared at the screen a second longer, then pushed the rolling chair back with her knees. The legs scraped. She slid the phone into her hoodie pocket without looking at him.
“Let’s go then.”
Outside, the yard had turned a dull winter color even without cold. Piles of aggregate looked like cheap mountains. The cranes lifted and froze. The sky was that washed out gray that made everything feel cheap. Leo walked a step behind her.
They climbed in. The cab smelled like stale smoke and orange air freshener. The seat belt cut across her chest. Leo slouched and watched her start the truck.
He looked her up and down once, shameless. “Your ass looking good tonight, though.”
Disgust crawled under her skin. She didn’t give it room. “You talk again, I’m driving your side into a pole.”
He put his hands up slow, mouth curving like it amused him. Then he mimed zipping his lips and tossing the key. She eased the truck out, heavy tires biting gravel, the mirrors shivering with every rut.
They rode in a quiet that wasn’t peace. The radio hissed low, nothing but static between stations. Mireya focused on the road. Once they hit Chef, the trucks multiplied. She threaded the lane clean, every shoulder check automatic, body tight to keep from brushing against how close he sat.
He cracked his knuckles. “We gonna be quick.”
She kept her eyes forward. The city slid by in small ugly pieces—vacant lots with water pooling where grass should be, a corner store with barred windows and hand-painted numbers, a man in a parka in weather that didn’t need one because poor meant always cold somewhere. She shifted in her seat to keep from brushing his thigh when she turned.
Leo made that sucking sound with his teeth he used when he wanted attention. She kept her face smooth. A stoplight threw red across the windshield. He opened his mouth.
She gunned the engine and crept closer to the shoulder.
He closed it again.
She waited in the cab while he disappeared into a small building with a door that shut soft and a camera that looked like it didn’t work. She watched two boys skate by with their laces untied. She checked her bank app again, quick this time, thumb moving like a thief. The number held.
The passenger door opened and Leo climbed back in, breath carrying the faint sour of cheap liquor and mint gum. He didn’t look at her. He counted a small stack with his thumb and forefinger, spit-slick, then held it out like he was handing food to a dog.
He started, “Now if you could—”
She snatched it and tucked it into her hoodie before he finished the sentence. The edges were still warm from his hand. “We done?”
He blinked, then smirked, then looked out the window like he had decided to be above it. “We done.”
They drove back with the same not-peace. She made the turn into the yard tight and smooth. The gravel popped under the tires like tiny bones. She parked hard enough to make the engine dip, turned the key, and the silence hit fast.
She got out without waiting for him, boots hitting ground with that flat sound of concrete dust. She pushed into the office with her shoulder and let it swing behind her.
Inside, the hum returned—the compressor rasp, the low rattle of a copier that always jammed on page two. She dropped into the chair and woke the computer with a click. The spreadsheet blinked on, patient. She pulled the money from her pocket and stacked it clean by the keyboard, flattening each bill with the side of her hand.
She went back to the spreadsheet. The tuition box first. The fees. Student ID. Parking. Each time she typed a new number, the remainder dropped like a slow elevator.
The yard door opened and shut somewhere behind her. Men talked in Spanish about rebar and trucks. A forklift beeped. She pressed her thumb into the notch by the spacebar where someone had worried the plastic smooth. The day sat on her shoulders, heavy and familiar.
She looked at the remaining balance. Smaller now. Not small. She traced the number with her eyes until it stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like work.
“White 19, white 19… Ready… Go. Go!”
Jay came across the formation. The snap smacked into his hands. Shuffle right. Quick shovel into Jay’s gut. Bonnabel’s defense surged downhill, convinced the ball was gone.
Jay never even blinked. He flipped it back, ball looping across the line.
Caine pulled it in clean, his eyes already upfield. He ripped it over the middle.
Tyron cut sharp across the seam, ball smacking his chest. He bulldozed one defender, spun out of another, and churned free for twenty more before a safety finally dragged him down inside the forty.
The chains moved. The stadium detonated. Bonnabel’s band tried to answer but got swallowed by the Karr bleachers, stamping their feet in unison.
On the opposite sideline, Bonnabel’s coaches threw their arms up, shouting coverages that had already failed.
…
Caine looked up at the scoreboard as he walked out of the huddle, rubbing gloved hands together. They were already up three scores.
He got set, scanning the defense, making adjustments.
He clapped his hands twice.
Snap. Ball hot against Caine’s palms. His eyes swept once—Matt smothered on the dig, Corey jammed and late off the line. Pressure cracked through the right edge, footsteps clawing for him.
He spun left. The defender’s hand brushed his shoulder pad, just enough to make him stumble a half-step.
Then open field.
Caine cut hard across the hash, cleats ripping divots out of the turf. Bonnabel jerseys swiped at his back, fingers catching nothing. He sprinted into daylight, crowd rising with every yard chewed. A corner lunged, fingertips grazing fabric. Too late.
He ripped twenty, twenty-five, before sliding near the sideline, dirt exploding around his knees. First down.
The crowd roared like the game had ended right there. He popped up, shouting toward the Bruins’ sideline, flexing his arms twice before jogging back to the middle of the field under a hail of teammates slapping him on his shoulders.
Bonnabel’s defense bent over hands on knees, gassed already, their breaths fogging under the lights.
…
They showed blitz, linebackers creeping like they had something left to prove.
“Kill, kill, kill! Alamo! Alamo!” Caine shouted before getting set again. “Ready… Go!”
The snap was clean. Fake into Jayden’s gut, then Caine pulled it back, feet setting fast. His arm whipped, ball slicing through the air on a line.
Corey streaked vertical, the safeties already wrong-footed by the fake. He knifed between them, stretched, and snagged it over his shoulder. One smooth stride and he was gone.
Touchdown.
The bleachers rattled, trumpets blaring the fight song. Corey spiked the ball, patted the top of his head and pointed at Bonnabel’s secondary. Karr’s sideline stormed forward, dancing, hollering, the ref shrieking his whistle to shove them back.
Caine ran toward the endzone, throwing up threes on both hands at the dejected Bonnabel players.
Scoreboard ticked: 44–6. The Bruins’ sideline sagged, helmets drooping. Their fans had gone quiet, just the scrape of their band trying to keep noise in the air.
…
Caine glanced at the sideline. Coach Joseph prepared the freshmen to take over to run the clock out.
Third and short. Bonnabel stacked the box, daring them. Caine crouched in shotgun, Jayden lined up beside him. Derrick barked at the defense, Darnell slapping his own helmet, ready to smash whoever lined across.
He lifted his foot. Tried to draw them offside with a series of “hut, huts.” They stayed in their place.
He looked over to the sideline again then back at the defense. “Go!”
The snap cracked. Fake inside. Caine tucked it and cut off Derrick’s hip, legs driving.
A linebacker met him square, helmet ramming under his chin. Pain burst across his ribs. Another body piled on, then another, but his feet kept churning. He dragged the whole mess three yards past the sticks before the whistle shrieked.
First down.
Caine ripped the ball free and raised it high, breath ragged, mouthpiece hanging from his facemask.
“You ain’t tough, pussy! Get the fuck off my field!” he shouted at the Bruins’ defenders. One of the referees quickly running over to diffuse any post-play shoving.
Bonnabel broke. Their defense trudged back, heads low.
…
The last minutes drained off the clock with the backups in. Freshmen got their shine, crowd already celebrating. Bonnabel barely moved the ball, every snap swallowed whole.
Final score: 58–6.
Caine stood near the sideline, helmet off, sweat cooling on his temples. His jersey clung heavy with grass stains streaked across the front. He paced a line just behind the white chalk, adrenaline still high.
“One and oh! One and oh! Don’t get big-headed!” Coach Joseph shouted at his starters between glances to the field and back at the bench.
The porch boards had a soft give in the middle where everybody stepped. Caine settled in that spot anyway, hoodie up, elbows on his knees, breath looping pale in the cool air. The courtyard looked different now that the trees had started letting go. Leaves gathered in the corners like brown hands, dry enough to talk when the wind pushed them.
Camila made her own weather in the pile by the steps. She kicked and laughed and then got serious, kneeling to choose. Every so often she ran to him with her offering, small palm open—this leaf heart shaped, this rock with a stripe like a road. She lingered against his shin long enough to feel the warmth through denim, then skipped back to the pile, two steps, three, stopping to look over her shoulder to make sure he stayed put.
“Go on,” he told her the first time, and she went. She did not stop checking.
Fall in New Orleans did not bite like the places he had seen on TV. It slid in thin and patient. A neighbor’s radio drifted up a floor and then fell quiet. Somewhere far off, a siren tested its throat and decided against singing. The laundry room vent breathed a mix of bleach and old heat into the air. He could taste salt in it.
He rubbed his hands once and felt the sting where a cut had gone soft at the edges. The hood muffled the world just enough to make his thoughts sound like they belonged to him. He reached into the pocket and brought out the small notebook, the cheap spiral with bent corners that always found its way back to him. He turned past pages where his writing leaned right, past a list of shoes to buy next year that he knew he would not, past a note he had written at practice about a route he wanted to try. He found a blank page and smoothed the crease with his palm.
The pen he kept tucked inside the spiral clicked. He set the notebook on his thigh. The page took the words in a groove that felt worn by the hands of the men in his family, even the ones who had never written anything down.
No matter what I make of myself, he wrote, no matter what jersey hangs in somebody’s locker with my name stitched small, this is it. This right here. You. You are the greatest thing I ever did.
He sat with it a second. He kept the sentences short. The letters linked and stood alone by turns. He dated the page and put a small star by it the way he did when it mattered more than usual. He thought about the first time he saw her heart on a grainy sonogram and how the sound had been a train with nowhere to be but here. He blinked and let the picture pass.
Camila crashed through leaves and found a little piece of sky that had fallen, a candy wrapper so clean it looked new. She brought it to him at a run.
He held out his hand. “Not that one, mamas.”
She handed it over like a secret and let him slip it into his pocket. Then she leaned her head against his knee for three beats he counted and went back to work, kicking until a new cloud of brittle color rose and rained down.
He closed the notebook and tapped it against his thigh once to make the words settle. The spiral caught on a stray thread and tugged it loose. He tucked the notebook away and pressed the thread down. His palm came away warm.
“Camila,” he called. “Ven aquí, mi vida.”
She spun like she knew her name was a song. The bow in her hair had gone crooked in the play and one curl had escaped to draw a lazy line across her cheek.
He patted his knee and she came, small sneakers scuffing, cheeks pink, eyes bright. She leaned her little weight into him and made a soft sound, not a word, just a content breath that said she knew his shape.
“I love you,” he said. “You know that?”
She nodded big, serious as church. “Love you too, Daddy.”
He felt it hit him all the way through. Some days the words rolled past him like traffic. Today they set in place like a brick. He slid his palm over her hair. The curl lifted and fell under his hand.
“Go play,” he said. “I’m right here.”
She lifted her face for a kiss and then ran. The pile took her like it had been waiting. She threw herself into it and disappeared up to her shoulders. Then a giggle bubbled up and she popped out smiling, hands full of crushed brown.
He watched the small mechanics of her joy, the way she sorted what was worth showing and what was for keeping and felt the steady pull in his chest that had nothing to do with lungs. He kept one eye on the steps, the instinct that had been with him since he was young, the one that counted doors and faces for danger even when there was none to count. The other stayed on her.
A bus sighed on the street. The courtyard gate yelped when somebody came through and then clanged shut. He did not turn to see. The hoodie held heat at the back of his neck. A line of ants worked the edge of the concrete. He tracked them until they vanished under the stoop.
Camila picked up two rocks and decided against one. She put it in her pocket with authority and trotted back with the other, breath coming in puffs. “Look,” she said, the k turning into a little t.
He took the rock and turned it in his fingers like he was a jeweler. “This one nice,” he said. “Where it go?”
She pointed at his hoodie pocket, the same one holding the notebook, then changed her mind and held out her own pocket. He placed it there like he was hiding treasure. She pressed the pocket flat with her hand and then patted his knee twice the way he patted her back at night.
“Go on,” he said again, softer.
She ran. The sky had gone that color New Orleans knew how to do where it was both bright and tired at once. The leaves made a dry city sound. He let his mind drift to the blank page he would fill when she went down, to the words he would find for the way she looked at him right before she fell asleep, to the promise he kept writing in different shapes—that he would stand where she could see him, even when the world asked him not to.
She found another heart shaped leaf. She looked at it. She looked at him. She started toward the pile and stopped. Her head turned. She checked to make sure he was still where she left him.
He was.
“I’m here,” he said, for her and for himself.
She flashed a grin that filled her whole face and dove back into the leaves. A beat later she looked back again, just to be sure.
~~~
The kitchen held a late-October quiet that came from the window propped open a crack and the pot on the back burner going low and steady. The table was cleaned off except for the stacks she’d made. Ones, fives, tens, twenties, each squared with edges lined like she could will the month into behaving. Hundreds on their own island near her elbow. Sara wrote in a cheap notebook with a pencil worn short, the eraser chewed to a pale nub. Due dates. Notes in Spanish and English, shorthand that made sense to no one but her. Light bill. Gas. Hector’s parts for the water heater if he didn’t find them used. Groceries. Detergent. A number for “just in case” that she crossed out and wrote again smaller.
She breathed through her nose and kept counting.
The three hundreds slid out from the tidy stack with a soft whisper. She stood, knees stiff from another day on her feet and dragged the step stool over the tile. It clicked once on a cracked grout line. She climbed, reached above the cabinet’s wood trim for the Virgin Mary figure that lived up where grease turned dust into a film. Mary came down careful in both hands. Sara flipped the smooth base, worried the plastic stopper free with a fingernail, and tugged the folded stash from the hollow. Rubber band. Old receipts wrapped like a skin. She tucked the three hundreds into the fold, pressed it shut, put the stopper back in, and lifted La Virgen into her place. The statue rocked once, then settled.
“Así,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
Back at the table, she took the stack she’d labeled extra, tapped it square against the surface, and slid open the bright macaw statue’s slot. The bird’s paint had chipped under the wing. She fed the bills inside until the belly felt tight.
“Para la casa,” she said, the way her mother said it, the way you said it when you were reminding the air what mattered.
Ziploc bags waited open on the table. She wrote on each with a blue pen. Mortgage. Entergy. Groceries. She portioned money into the plastic, pressed the zippers closed, let the air burp out with a small sigh.
Footsteps came soft down the hall. Saul pushed the door with his shoulder and paused like he’d walked in on a prayer. A slice of hallway light lay across his face before the door swung back. He lifted his chin.
“Oye, tia,” he said, reflex wrong before he corrected himself with a small, embarrassed grin. “Hola, tia, I mean.”
She didn’t tease him for it. “Oye, Sobrino,” Sara said, warmth tucked behind the tired. She finished sealing the last bag. “You eat?”
He shook his head and went to the fridge. The light hit the sill of jars and a leftover foil tray. He pulled a Jarritos and twisted the cap off, glass clinking against the counter. Lime fizz hissed out. He didn’t drink right away. Just watched the table, the statutes of money, the calendar math in Sara’s notebook like it was a language he almost understood.
They let the pot simmer fill the space. Outside, someone’s radio caught a station wrong and faded back to static. A bus sighed two blocks over. The cool coming in through the window carried laundry soap and the faint bleach of the stairwell.
“Caine okay?” Saul asked, voice pitched casual, like asking about the weather might be safer.
Sara nodded once, eyes still on the bags. “Could’ve ended up worse places than his girlfriend’s bed,” she said, a small smile sliding through, irony and resignation meeting in the middle. She stacked the Ziplocs by size, knocked the corners even with the heel of her hand.
Saul turned the bottle in his palm. Condensation ran down and made a clean circle on the counter. He swallowed like the words stuck first, then came out anyway. “I’m sorry about—you know—the gun thing.”
She looked up and really looked at him. The boy who wasn’t a boy anymore. The same mouth from when he was five and hid under tables. The same eyes from last week when he wouldn’t meet hers. She stepped around the chair and touched his cheek with the open gentleness she didn’t spend on many people.
“I think we all have things to be sorry about,” she said softly.
Color rose under the brown of his skin like the heat from the stove had reached him. He nodded, quiet, and finally took a drink.
Sara carried the bags to the drawer by the stove. It stuck the way it always did. She bumped her hip into the cabinet to loosen it, slipped the plastic inside, and pushed the drawer shut with her wrist. The click felt like a small door closing somewhere a little farther down the road.
Saul leaned in the archway and watched her without trying to hide it. “He coming back?” he asked, the words simple and loaded.
She put the step stool away, folded its legs with a snap, and set it between the fridge and the wall. She didn’t turn around when she answered. “Probably not.”
She rinsed her hands at the sink, the water running cold enough to wake her joints. She dried them on the dish towel she’d washed thin and hung back on the oven handle the way she always did.
Sara took the pot off the burner and set it to cool. She turned the clock on the stove back two minutes because it had run fast again. Her shoulder pinched when she reached up to straighten the calendar page. She rolled it once and the knot let go.
She stepped toward the hall and paused in the doorway to the dark. The house felt like it always did at this hour—tired and still and holding.
“Apaga la luz,” she said over her shoulder, voice low, already leaving the room.
~~~
The office window glass held a film of dust that no rag ever fully cleared. The light came through thin, a cold strip across the desk where the old keyboard sat crooked. Mireya rubbed her thumb along the trackpad. The spreadsheet held its grid like a stubborn face. Tuition, fees, health compliance, lab kit, parking.
Her bank app glowed on the phone beside the mouse. The total pulsed higher than it had any right to be, padded by envelopes Caine had pressed in her palm with that quiet look that asked nothing and everything. Construction money. The other money. She didn’t separate the bills when she counted. The numbers didn’t care.
Neither did she.
She tucked stray hair behind her ear and moved a hundred from one column to another. The orange cells shifted to yellow. Not solved, but less red. She let the breath she was holding out through her nose. The office hummed with the small sounds of a place that never slept. A compressor somewhere coughed and caught. Diesel upshifted at the gate. Dust lifted and settled again on the sill.
Boot steps came slow across the concrete, heel toe heel. She kept her eyes on the screen.
“Mireyaaa. Mamacita,” Leo sang, voice full of fake sweetness. “I need you to drive me.”
She clicked into the next line and typed a date. “Ask Denise.”
“I might as well drive myself then.” He leaned on the doorjamb like it had been built for him. “Won’t cut your portion this time.”
“Ask Denise,” she said again. Her mouth didn’t move much. The cursor blinked. The phone buzzed with a low battery warning, and she ignored it.
“You don’t gotta do nothing for me not to cut it,” he said. “Scouts’ honor.”
He crossed his heart with two fingers and threw up a crooked salute like he’d ever worn a uniform for anything but court.
Mireya stared at the screen a second longer, then pushed the rolling chair back with her knees. The legs scraped. She slid the phone into her hoodie pocket without looking at him.
“Let’s go then.”
Outside, the yard had turned a dull winter color even without cold. Piles of aggregate looked like cheap mountains. The cranes lifted and froze. The sky was that washed out gray that made everything feel cheap. Leo walked a step behind her.
They climbed in. The cab smelled like stale smoke and orange air freshener. The seat belt cut across her chest. Leo slouched and watched her start the truck.
He looked her up and down once, shameless. “Your ass looking good tonight, though.”
Disgust crawled under her skin. She didn’t give it room. “You talk again, I’m driving your side into a pole.”
He put his hands up slow, mouth curving like it amused him. Then he mimed zipping his lips and tossing the key. She eased the truck out, heavy tires biting gravel, the mirrors shivering with every rut.
They rode in a quiet that wasn’t peace. The radio hissed low, nothing but static between stations. Mireya focused on the road. Once they hit Chef, the trucks multiplied. She threaded the lane clean, every shoulder check automatic, body tight to keep from brushing against how close he sat.
He cracked his knuckles. “We gonna be quick.”
She kept her eyes forward. The city slid by in small ugly pieces—vacant lots with water pooling where grass should be, a corner store with barred windows and hand-painted numbers, a man in a parka in weather that didn’t need one because poor meant always cold somewhere. She shifted in her seat to keep from brushing his thigh when she turned.
Leo made that sucking sound with his teeth he used when he wanted attention. She kept her face smooth. A stoplight threw red across the windshield. He opened his mouth.
She gunned the engine and crept closer to the shoulder.
He closed it again.
She waited in the cab while he disappeared into a small building with a door that shut soft and a camera that looked like it didn’t work. She watched two boys skate by with their laces untied. She checked her bank app again, quick this time, thumb moving like a thief. The number held.
The passenger door opened and Leo climbed back in, breath carrying the faint sour of cheap liquor and mint gum. He didn’t look at her. He counted a small stack with his thumb and forefinger, spit-slick, then held it out like he was handing food to a dog.
He started, “Now if you could—”
She snatched it and tucked it into her hoodie before he finished the sentence. The edges were still warm from his hand. “We done?”
He blinked, then smirked, then looked out the window like he had decided to be above it. “We done.”
They drove back with the same not-peace. She made the turn into the yard tight and smooth. The gravel popped under the tires like tiny bones. She parked hard enough to make the engine dip, turned the key, and the silence hit fast.
She got out without waiting for him, boots hitting ground with that flat sound of concrete dust. She pushed into the office with her shoulder and let it swing behind her.
Inside, the hum returned—the compressor rasp, the low rattle of a copier that always jammed on page two. She dropped into the chair and woke the computer with a click. The spreadsheet blinked on, patient. She pulled the money from her pocket and stacked it clean by the keyboard, flattening each bill with the side of her hand.
She went back to the spreadsheet. The tuition box first. The fees. Student ID. Parking. Each time she typed a new number, the remainder dropped like a slow elevator.
The yard door opened and shut somewhere behind her. Men talked in Spanish about rebar and trucks. A forklift beeped. She pressed her thumb into the notch by the spacebar where someone had worried the plastic smooth. The day sat on her shoulders, heavy and familiar.
She looked at the remaining balance. Smaller now. Not small. She traced the number with her eyes until it stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like work.
~~~
Caine crouched in shotgun. “White 19, white 19… Ready… Go. Go!”
Jay came across the formation. The snap smacked into his hands. Shuffle right. Quick shovel into Jay’s gut. Bonnabel’s defense surged downhill, convinced the ball was gone.
Jay never even blinked. He flipped it back, ball looping across the line.
Caine pulled it in clean, his eyes already upfield. He ripped it over the middle.
Tyron cut sharp across the seam, ball smacking his chest. He bulldozed one defender, spun out of another, and churned free for twenty more before a safety finally dragged him down inside the forty.
The chains moved. The stadium detonated. Bonnabel’s band tried to answer but got swallowed by the Karr bleachers, stamping their feet in unison.
On the opposite sideline, Bonnabel’s coaches threw their arms up, shouting coverages that had already failed.
…
Caine looked up at the scoreboard as he walked out of the huddle, rubbing gloved hands together. They were already up three scores.
He got set, scanning the defense, making adjustments.
He clapped his hands twice.
Snap. Ball hot against Caine’s palms. His eyes swept once—Matt smothered on the dig, Corey jammed and late off the line. Pressure cracked through the right edge, footsteps clawing for him.
He spun left. The defender’s hand brushed his shoulder pad, just enough to make him stumble a half-step.
Then open field.
Caine cut hard across the hash, cleats ripping divots out of the turf. Bonnabel jerseys swiped at his back, fingers catching nothing. He sprinted into daylight, crowd rising with every yard chewed. A corner lunged, fingertips grazing fabric. Too late.
He ripped twenty, twenty-five, before sliding near the sideline, dirt exploding around his knees. First down.
The crowd roared like the game had ended right there. He popped up, shouting toward the Bruins’ sideline, flexing his arms twice before jogging back to the middle of the field under a hail of teammates slapping him on his shoulders.
Bonnabel’s defense bent over hands on knees, gassed already, their breaths fogging under the lights.
…
They showed blitz, linebackers creeping like they had something left to prove.
“Kill, kill, kill! Alamo! Alamo!” Caine shouted before getting set again. “Ready… Go!”
The snap was clean. Fake into Jayden’s gut, then Caine pulled it back, feet setting fast. His arm whipped, ball slicing through the air on a line.
Corey streaked vertical, the safeties already wrong-footed by the fake. He knifed between them, stretched, and snagged it over his shoulder. One smooth stride and he was gone.
Touchdown.
The bleachers rattled, trumpets blaring the fight song. Corey spiked the ball, patted the top of his head and pointed at Bonnabel’s secondary. Karr’s sideline stormed forward, dancing, hollering, the ref shrieking his whistle to shove them back.
Caine ran toward the endzone, throwing up threes on both hands at the dejected Bonnabel players.
Scoreboard ticked: 44–6. The Bruins’ sideline sagged, helmets drooping. Their fans had gone quiet, just the scrape of their band trying to keep noise in the air.
…
Caine glanced at the sideline. Coach Joseph prepared the freshmen to take over to run the clock out.
Third and short. Bonnabel stacked the box, daring them. Caine crouched in shotgun, Jayden lined up beside him. Derrick barked at the defense, Darnell slapping his own helmet, ready to smash whoever lined across.
He lifted his foot. Tried to draw them offside with a series of “hut, huts.” They stayed in their place.
He looked over to the sideline again then back at the defense. “Go!”
The snap cracked. Fake inside. Caine tucked it and cut off Derrick’s hip, legs driving.
A linebacker met him square, helmet ramming under his chin. Pain burst across his ribs. Another body piled on, then another, but his feet kept churning. He dragged the whole mess three yards past the sticks before the whistle shrieked.
First down.
Caine ripped the ball free and raised it high, breath ragged, mouthpiece hanging from his facemask.
“You ain’t tough, pussy! Get the fuck off my field!” he shouted at the Bruins’ defenders. One of the referees quickly running over to diffuse any post-play shoving.
Bonnabel broke. Their defense trudged back, heads low.
…
The last minutes drained off the clock with the backups in. Freshmen got their shine, crowd already celebrating. Bonnabel barely moved the ball, every snap swallowed whole.
Final score: 58–6.
Caine stood near the sideline, helmet off, sweat cooling on his temples. His jersey clung heavy with grass stains streaked across the front. He paced a line just behind the white chalk, adrenaline still high.
“One and oh! One and oh! Don’t get big-headed!” Coach Joseph shouted at his starters between glances to the field and back at the bench.
American Sun
On some DJP shit, are you playing the HS games in RTG and extrapolating that to form the season or this is freestyle?
The Leo situation is a bomb waiting to happen
The Leo situation is a bomb waiting to happen
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Captain Canada
- Posts: 4735
- Joined: 01 Dec 2018, 00:15
American Sun
Leo gonna grow pretty desperate soon.
And it ain't wishing ill on Caine, he's just playing a risky ass game.
And it ain't wishing ill on Caine, he's just playing a risky ass game.
American Sun
felt that first partCaesar wrote: ↑16 Sep 2025, 23:29No matter what I make of myself, he wrote, no matter what jersey hangs in somebody’s locker with my name stitched small, this is it. This right here. You. You are the greatest thing I ever did.
Disgust crawled under her skin. She didn’t give it room. “You talk again, I’m driving your side into a pole.”
poor choice of words around Leo
American Sun
caught back up. I agree with soap - shit finna pop off with nine updates left.
Leo going to convince Mireya to take one last ride and get into some foul shit
Leo going to convince Mireya to take one last ride and get into some foul shit
American Sun
Played them, good sir. Not that there's much you can get from them.
We shall see when/if it blows up.What he gon' get desperate for? He got other lil' juvies.Captain Canada wrote: ↑17 Sep 2025, 11:38Leo gonna grow pretty desperate soon.
And it ain't wishing ill on Caine, he's just playing a risky ass game.
#JustDadThingsdjp73 wrote: ↑17 Sep 2025, 12:35felt that first partCaesar wrote: ↑16 Sep 2025, 23:29No matter what I make of myself, he wrote, no matter what jersey hangs in somebody’s locker with my name stitched small, this is it. This right here. You. You are the greatest thing I ever did.
Disgust crawled under her skin. She didn’t give it room. “You talk again, I’m driving your side into a pole.”
poor choice of words around Leo
Why ya say that?
Leave it to this man to still somehow put Mireya in the wrong
