Marta Núñez Pouzols
Wheelie Economy
A paradox is the juggler card. It requires practice, timing, grace, and a taste for showing off. I asked my dad what an intellectual was. He said there were no intellectuals anymore. Not in 1992, not anymore. I was reading an English language textbook, featuring London and red buses. Actually it was the phone cabins the ones that were red. The way a book and its images infiltrated the world and subjugated it. A feral prism of obsession to retain this very memory, forever dog eared, forever waiting for you. A friend of my dad’s recalling his teen years: maybe the girl he was into didn’t like him back, but the book he was reading was always there, waiting for him. A friend of my mom’s asked me whether I had ever fallen in love. Absolutely not. Never? But you could fall in love with a dress, or with a song. Maybe. Maybe with a song. I could see that. Under the bright lights outside the neighborhood bar, aluminum tables, plastic chairs. Pour the spicy broth of the snails in a glass and drink it, a spicy shot. In front of the bar, a huge playground. Herds of children, making each other louder, faster, more fidgety, more powerful, high on summer break. This giant horizontal spinning wheel they had to weld to the ground because it kept on spewing children into the coarse yellow ground. Some kind of sinister sprinkler. Another kid proudly shows me the pink scab on his elbow. Taste it. No way. But it tastes like strawberry. I don’t like strawberry. It tastes like chocolate then. Under no circumstances should you detach a scab from the skin. It could mark you forever—an infection tattoo. For days and days, I waited for a huge brown scab covering most of my knee to ripen and fall. My biggest scab yet. I was fascinated by it. I kept it in the drawer. I fed it to my Barbie dolls, like a big burger.
At night, better to stay close to the bar lights. The scary teenagers were at the back of the neighborhood, where it’s darker. Sticky hash rocks, lighter labor to make it crumble. Expert cigarette surgery. Juggling forties, belly buttons, and hair gel crowns. Prodigy, tecno-rumba. Twenty scooters and not a single muffle. Wheelies on the pedestrian floor, wheelies among the baby strollers, wheelies across the porticos. A flourishing wheelie economy.
When I was six being a teen seemed extravagant and lame. I lived next to a high school. In bed I could hear a big dog bark. The high school dog, my mom called it. She threatened to bring the dog into the apartment if I didn’t fall asleep. Where did the lost tradition of terrifying children into sleep go? Go to sleep, my child, go to sleep now. If not, the Coco will come and eat you up. If you asked where your mom was, adults would tell you: a dog grabbed her in its mouth and took her away. No one ever lost a chance to mildly shock and scare a child. The small things in life. Who do you love more, your mom or your dad? And when the child replied to immediately reprimand: You have to say you love both the same. My mom had a family of owls in her hand. They would come out separately, and talk to me. Each finger had a different personality. There was Mom Owl, Dad Owl, Girl Owl, Baby Owl… All friendly but the ring finger: Bad Owl. Bad Owl could transform the room with its evil. Like the exorcist’s girl.
Marta Núñez Pouzols is an Andalusian writer and translator living in Durham, NC. Her work can be found in DREGINALD, mercury firs, Currents, Cul-de-sac of Blood, peel lit (forthcoming), and elsewhere. Together with Maia Morosano, she co-authored the bilingual collection Pronombres siderales/Starry Selves (Turba, 2019). She cocurates the reading series Paradiso, organizes the horizontal workshop Moon Palace, and writes pieces on film and sound. She often writes album descriptions for the label enmossed.