FICTION: MARIANA ENRIQUEZ MY SAD DEAD

First, I think I should describe the neighborhood.

Because my house is in the neighborhood, and my mother is in the house, and you can't understand one thing without the other, and you especially can't understand why I don't leave. Because I could leave. I could leave tomorrow.

The neighborhood has changed since I was a child. The houses, originally for British railroad workers, were built along these narrow streets back in the twenties: stone houses with lovely little gardens and tall windows with iron shutters. You could say that it was the residents themselves who gradually ruined the houses with all their innovating: the air-conditioning units, the tiled roofs, upper stories tacked on using different materials, exterior facings and paint jobs in ridiculous colors, original wooden doors replaced with cheaper knockoffs. But it wasn't just the residents' poor taste; the neighborhood suffered because it became an island. It's bordered on the west by the avenue, which is like an ugly river we have to ford, with nothing much along its shores. To the south there are housing projects that have grown ever more dangerous, with kids selling crack in stairwells and sometimes pulling guns on one another when they fight, or firing bullets into the air if they're mad after losing a soccer game. To the north is a tract of land that was supposed to be developed into some kind of sports field, but instead it was occupied by the very poor, who have built houses there, the best ones made of concrete blocks, the most precarious of tin and cardboard. The housing projects and this slum merge to the east of our neighborhood.