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Ballad\u00a0for Botox<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Seventeen is a dream; fat with attitude and a bit of cunning, he wears it in age clients knows him as: twenty-one.\u00a0 Usually, they’re over\u00a0fifty-five, divorced, widowed, all married to loneliness and means. Ms. Lydia Betancourt, over there, is one of them, refreshed. It\u2019s the\u00a0Botox, coaxing wrinkles to stretch. On her pool, tattoos that worship Ch\u00e9 and Fidel splash butterflies in muscular arms that cradle nights and days.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She waits for\u00a0their hands to instigate revolutions on the desert of her back, where lotion motions deep oasis of relaxation.\u00a0 The cue is her top, untied: it\u2019s a Bardot moment, undressing St. Tropez, Costa del Sol, or anywhere along the Mediterranean.\u00a0 Indeed, the past still clocks her, though now hypertension and other conditions of the heart unleash animals worse than ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends; and so, once again, she is a playground, a moveable feast of aches and pains.\u00a0 Thus, she waits for him, to interrogate this carnival with his hands, with their macho, cock-sure calculations.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the cue is ignored.\u00a0 It\u2019s all about rubbing the interval, the gap, to expand it, swell it to\u00a0heighten expectations. Like Ch\u00e9 and Fidel\u2019s dream, he, too, has visions for the future: to sever himself from her, her needs, and her suffocating, mothering power, amidst stuffy doilies and\u00a0accoutrements of old, inherited money.\u00a0 And he wants out. But first: a demand, just hundreds more, maybe eight or nine, and why not four figures or five, for something to live on. Otherwise, he\u2019d execute the threat, the plan, and tell her, that he is really seventeen, and she\u2019d be on a list of pedophiles online if she refuses what he wants.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Soon, his palms mount pressures down the valley of wrinkles that is her back.\u00a0 He lathers high praise about her face, in Spanish, teasing her, just like the first time, barely a month ago.\u00a0 He is her new migrant gardener,\u00a0weaving, sweating\u00a0a story \u2013 in convincing, broken English \u2013 of loss, desperation, and a place to stay.\u00a0 \u00a0But she understands his game, being one of its veterans.\u00a0 And so, she dramatized empathy, took him for lunch, then dressed him, the way desperate men dressed and fed her years ago, as their clandestine hobby, away from wife and family. Overwhelmed by his charm, she called him days later, and\u00a0hired him as her new, live-in housekeeper.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Beside them, the pool glitters\u00a0over\u00a0voice unheard from him: in fluent, unaccented English, he\u00a0tells her, tells her\u00a0like he’s\u00a0singing a love song, melodious,\u00a0that he is a minor, a high school drop-out, and all he wants is the latest Mustang model on the market, red,\u00a0plus six-figure cash in a bag.\u00a0That\u2019s all, Senora Betancourt<\/em>, he said,\u00a0that\u2019s all I need, and I won\u2019t tell anyone, and you won\u2019t see me again, ever again<\/em>, as he tongued her ears, licked them deep, like fierce butterflies he frees on the pool, as her thighs open to welcome fat-fingers, rubbing her into a traffic, a riot of moans sweating humid, Atlantic breezes, before the inevitable.\u00a0The scream is quick and abrupt, as though a last hurrah, before a\u00a0violent seizure colonized her,\u00a0and extinguished air from her heart.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Breathing into her mouth opens a hollow that refuses to hide him.\u00a0 The air panics for exit, for new tomorrows, new victims, new personalities.\u00a0 She is peace uninterrupted now, forever exiled from thirty-year-old men and their pubescent, unconvincing conspiracies, playing twenty-one pretending seventeen with fake, high school ID.\u00a0 Memory of a\u00a0body beside a pool accelerates\u00a0a stolen\u00a0BMW, sweating erratic streets that orphaned him, then fathered him to farm baits, abstract and otherwise,\u00a0until inflections mastered midnights into lucrative parks, bars, or street-corners, despite failures, ever ready for desperate, maximum effect.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n M. Leland Oroquieta<\/strong>\u00a0used to write op-ed pieces for his alma mater\u2019s paper. Each month, Chinatown trims his hair under careful, Guangzhou hands. The day-job and the long commute to work are daily preludes before post-dinner, desk-time, struggling to finish a novel. His latest work has appeared in\u00a0Local Nomad: An Online Journal of Writing & Art.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ballad\u00a0for Botox Seventeen is a dream; fat with attitude and a bit of cunning, he wears it in age clients knows him as: twenty-one.\u00a0 Usually, they’re over\u00a0fifty-five, divorced, widowed, all married to loneliness and means. Ms. Lydia Betancourt, over there, is one of them, refreshed. It\u2019s the\u00a0Botox, coaxing wrinkles to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9149,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9147\/revisions\/9149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}