IF I COULD AFFORD A HOUSE, I WOULD By Esenia Banuelos

The Rising Phoenix Review

March 2

IF I COULD AFFORD A HOUSE, I WOULD

ask that it be built in working-class Chicagoland. This particular part of the middle school parking lot houses ﬁelds of untamed vegetation and isolated brick rather than people. I would point across and ask the exhausted albañil on the curb to take one of the empty plains in which a decrepit building's remains were thrown, and sculpt not an apartment, not a mansion, but a home of brick and tinder. I ﬁrst ask him to build a base that spills out onto space on a constructed hill of rubble. I would then request that he guts the hill and lays down an unsteamed carpet with ﬁngernails and dead skin and crumbs braided in the ﬁbers, and upon that place a cedar wine-cellar with an expired vodka its latent drinker assumed would age like wine, and make sure that it is parallel to a kitchen of asymmetrical modernist and traditionalist type with a well-loved Bustelo's Instant Coﬀee pot on the counter. Leave the comal stained black with charred crumbs, paint iron-into-terracotta gradients on las casuelas, and break the kitchen's pipes so that the only house's only working sink is a plastic box in the laundry room. The albañil cocks his eyebrow and poses the golden question: "We are in Tornado Alley, why do you want a house without a foundation?" I want my bedroom window to be cracked as if a sixth grader would have cocked a rock from exactly this position in the lot, but with not enough force to get through the second layer of glass and into the room itself. I want the bed-frame and the night-stand to be completely empty except for a sixth grader's Beauty and the Beast notebook with one used page that says I want Mamí and Papí to leave this place and have a big house in St. John's, Indiana when I am rich and famous and a princess behind lead bars. For the bathrooms, I want one right across – could you try making the aging tiles weak by showering for years without a towel under your feet, until you feel the ground sink with just your left heel? There should be another directly under it, with a lump directly above a thinly-piped toilet, and the wall's skin sweating onto its spine as the month's hot water disappears in one shower. Keep everything on at once – keep the fridge open, keep the televisions playing Univision but change it to Liga occasionally for México's games and place two indents where palms will lean when the Guadalajara Chivas make a goal. Steal two run-away parakeets oﬀ the trees and train them on Mexican banda until they yell like fathers more than they sing like birds, and place them in the basement where the only mode of entertainment is a red Wii that managed to grow mold in its disc slot. By the entrance, haphazardly place three pairs of shoes: some well-worn women's Purple Flex Nike Runs (fake), some well-loved checkered Vans (fake), and some well-ruined, knock-oﬀ Adidas brand from Marshall's (real). Make the door unlockable and always slightly ajar. The albañil will beam, "I think you're forgetting something, viejita!" and there is laughter in this lot I could never call home.

Albañil: Construction worker & Cazuelas: Cooking pots & Comal: Sheet pan & Viejita: Old woman

By Esenia Banuelos

Biography:

Esenia Banuelos is a living Mexican-American word-wreath from Chicago, Illinois. She is an undergraduate double-major in Educational Studies and Linguistic & Language in the Quaker Consortium and a preschool aide for the Phebe Anna Thorne School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her work is rooted in the semantic and syntactic revolution of Chicano identity and confronting the generational traumas of NAFTA, Bracero, and mixed status living.