Barcelona

I already know how many leaves are on the tree. I planted the tree. I know everything about the tree. You don’t need to give me useless information about my own tree, but you continue to record in your little black notebook how many leaves hang from the branches, and there is nothing I can do to stop you.

You act as though your death will be the worst moment of your life, but I think it will be the best - spectacular, even. I always imagined fireworks and trumpets. Your entire life has been about death, therefore your death should be full of life.

When you were a child you had fainting spells. Every time you felt one coming on, you were convinced you were about to die. Standing in your kitchen all of a sudden your ears would ring, everything would go dark, and minutes later you’d wake up on the ground covered in marks. You fell so much your skin was tinged gray, as if all of the bruises with which you were adorned had melded together to form a completely new layer of skin, blood right at the surface, as if ready to spring a leak if you ever didn’t count something that needed to be counted.

Your mother had bought you a collection of little black notebooks to encourage your habit. I don’t know if she believed that your counting really would ward off your own death or if she was just trying to give you peace-of-mind. She gave them to you right before she died in what the police called a murder-suicide. She had set her car on fire with herself and your father inside. All they found of your parents were a few of your mother’s teeth and your father’s singed hand melted onto the steering wheel. She had left you a letter that morning and the police deemed it a suicide note.

You thought your fainting spells would have gotten worse after your parents died but they seemed to stop altogether. You attributed that to the fact that the notebooks your mother had given you worked. As long as you wrote down what you counted, you would be safe.

The notebooks were numbered, and the last book in the bunch had revealed on its final page that your mother had left you something buried underneath the lone patch of daffodils on the outskirts of the local cemetery.

You hear a clang as your shovel lifts its fourteenth pile of dirt from the earth and find a metal trunk haphazardly buried not even six feet below the ground.

Before opening the trunk, you take the package of peanut butter cups out of your pocket. You and your mother used to go to the gas station four times a week to buy tickets for the Silver Dollar Lotto and would split a package of peanut butter cups while you each took turns scratching off the little dollar signs.

All that was ever revealed on the cards were pennies and dimes - no silver dollars, not even a quarter. Ironically, your mother could have had the 20,000 dollars within a few years had she just saved her money instead of buying flimsy cardboard dream-crushers every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

You can’t bring yourself to eat the second peanut butter cup, although you haven’t had one in years. Your boyfriend is deathly allergic to peanuts, which you learned one night when you kissed him five hours after eating some peanut butter crackers. He had nearly died, and you had counted his teeth while calling 911 to make sure he didn’t stop breathing. But the second peanut butter cup was for your mother. You tuck it in your back pocket, wrapped in its orange packaging.

You open the latch to the trunk and unhinge the lid. Inside is a pile of little black notebooks just like the ones your mother had gotten you so many years ago. You flip open the notebook on top and brace yourself, as if your mother’s spirt is going to escape from the pages and tell you her unfinished business.

1 ticket

25 notebooks

20,000 dollars

Beneath the words is a drawing of a flower inside a square - a perfect circle with four even petals surrounding it. You know you’ve seen this symbol before but you can’t place exactly where.

You count the notebooks just to be sure there are really 25, and there are. You find that beneath the notebooks is a large paper bag stuffed with stacks and stacks of cash. You shouldn’t need to count all of the money since it’s written down in the notebook, but I know you will anyway, and you do.

You finish counting and reach into the bag for one last surprise - a winning Silver Dollar Lotto ticket. Before your mother’s death, she had won 20,000 dollars in the Silver Dollar Lottery and had left it for you.

You pack up the trunk and lug it home to yours and your boyfriend’s apartment. On the way, you count the gnats that make up the cloud above your head in the humid air and report it back to me.

When you arrive home, your boyfriend is asleep on the couch, snoring with the gruffness of a wild boar being restrained. He awakes himself with a particularly violent snort and finds you standing in the doorway, trunk in hand, face as if you’d seen a ghost. He asks what is in the trunk and you answer with the truth.

“Notebooks,” you say.

Your boyfriend doesn’t like your counting habit and never supported it. He always thought the best thing to do was to quit cold turkey. He had thrown all of your notebooks into the dumpster once, but you had dived into the sea of grimy banana peels and leftover lo mein and had found all 457 by the grace of somebody other than me.

He chastises you for buying more notebooks and reaches for the trunk. You scream a bloodcurdling shriek and realize your mistake right away; no amount of notebooks would cause anyone to scream with the desperation and horror that just escaped your lips.

Suspicious, he grabs the trunk from you as you are sidetracked counting his freckles. He breaks the latch off of it, throwing the top to the side, empties the trunk of the notebooks, and finds the bag of cash at the bottom. His face lights up like he just saw a small child slip on the ice, something he laughed at frequently in the frigid winters of New York, and clutches the money to his chest.

Before he is able to collect his thoughts or absorb the fact that the woman who barely made minimum wage as a cashier at a grocery store just brought home the most money he had ever seen in his life, you kick him in the stomach. He’s a solid man, but between your electric energy and him being taken off-guard, he falls straight back onto the ground and you snatch the bag of money from him.

You run down the stairs and he is not far behind. He tackles you and you both tumble down the steps as he pulls your hair and rips a clump out. You look up at him and blink as it is no longer your boyfriend’s face that you see but your father’s.

As he fights you for the money, you find yourself in your childhood home. Your ears ring and you begin to blackout but you fight it as your father makes his way towards you, a quiet yet deadly anger on his face. You shake your head and find yourself back in your apartment building, ripping a paper bag full of cash nearly in half as your boyfriend unrelentingly beats you down.

He grabs the money and runs, and as you dizzily chase him you realize the fainting spells you always thought would send you six feet under as a child must have been some kind of panic attack that came over you before your father attacked you. The bruises that decorated your alabaster skin were not from falling but from the repeated blows to your delicate body.

Your boyfriend reaches his car and pulls out his keys. Before you realize you’ve even thought of a plan, you find yourself pulling the second peanut butter cup out of your pocket and shoving it in his mouth. He begins spitting and retching and you know the damage is done. He falls to the ground and you grab the money and keys and climb into his car.

You don’t know where you’re going, but as you begin to drive you think that I might exact revenge on you for murdering one of my kids, and you pull out the book of matches you keep with you to count when you’re nervous. The money in the passenger seat beside you, you pull out matches one at a time and toss them on top of the bag, counting as you go. You think back on what you saw in the notebook - the picture of the flower - and try to discern what it means.

You hear sirens in the distance and realize that someone must have found your boyfriend and called an ambulance. You press on the gas a little harder to get farther away from the scene. Your mind flashes back to you in your grandmother’s kitchen, your father yelling at you, your grandmother beating him with a ladle as he threatens to break your finger. You look down and see the flower that had been drawn in the notebook etched within the tiles on the floor.


Panot flower. It was the Barcelona flower. The tiles that lined the streets of Barcelona were adorned with this perfectly petaled symbol. Your mother is alive. She was in Barcelona. She had killed your father and thrown her own teeth in the car, left a suicide note, and escaped so she wouldn’t get caught, and she had left you a message in your last notebook so you could go find her.

Tears streaming down your face as you turn left to begin to head for the airport, you accidentally strike one of the matches and toss it onto the bag full of money on the passenger seat.

The bag begins to burn. The money begins to burn. You frantically try to put the fire out, but it’s burning too quickly. As you start to pull over you hear sirens behind you and realize someone must have seen you attempt to kill your boyfriend and the police are after you. You can’t pull over or you’ll be arrested.

Your mother is sitting behind you telling you to calm down and count the clouds in the sky. Your father is sitting next to her screaming at you to pull over and get out. Your father shakes your seat and demands that you stop counting. Your mother sings a soft song she learned from your grandmother in Catalan.

The fire burns, but you keep driving. The police catch up to you. The car crashes into a tree and sets the tree on fire, making the electrical wires spark and cutting off power to half of the city. Police sirens echo, your body is engulfed in flames, and it’s like a beautiful fireworks display.

I always knew your death would be spectacular.