American Magic

Everyone says Josue’s hands are made to pack broccoli. Josue doesn’t know about that—he’d be good at any job because he has to be. He lives to make sure his brothers and mom can eat. Plus, this job is simple: the crates of broccoli come in, his coworkers trim the leaves and ugly bits, then he rubber bands together a couple stems and returns them to the line to be tagged and boxed. Sixty broccoli heads come down the line every minute, and Josue doesn’t miss a single one until today.

Josue’s left glove tears at the thumb. He tries to ignore it, but the tear catches on the conveyor belt. Panic shoots through his body as he yanks his hand away, but the thin plastic holds and pulls his thumb the wrong way. Afterwards, Josue can’t feel his thumb—he’s sure that the machine cut it off. He holds his hand up, surprised to see his thumb fully attached. Josue goes right back to bunching broccoli, doing his best to ignore the growing pain.

Then Josue grabs the next bunch. Then the next. And the next. His thumb is barely moving. He’s never needed to take a break, but he wishes he could dunk his thumb in a tub of ice. Jose rests his thumb on the cold broccoli, hoping that soothes the pain.

It doesn’t.

By the end of his shift, Josue’s thumb is swollen. He tries to pull off the glove, but the movement only makes the pain worse.

He walks out of the refrigerated room and John says, “You weren’t keeping up with the production target. Something wrong?”

“Busted my thumb,” Josue says. But John scrunches up his eyes like he doesn’t understand. Josue takes a deep breath and holds up his thumb.

John shrugs.  “Just, put it in ice. I’m gonna write your crew up, so do better tomorrow.” John leans over his desk and writes something down.

As he does, Josue’s left pinky fades and disappears. The glove around the finger hangs limp. He presses the area where his finger had been, but it’s smooth like any other part of his hand. There’s no scar or sign that his pinky had ever been there at all.

“Sorry, sir,” Josue says.

“Don’t hit me with that ‘sir’ shit, man. Friends call me Johnny.” John forces an uncomfortable smile, but his eyes show no kindness.

“Okay, I’ll do better tomorrow,” Josue says, then quickly adds, “Johnny.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then!” John says, waving Josue off before leaning over his desk and writing something else down.

Josue waits for the bus in the employee parking lot among all the rusted blocky cars. He’s heard from other workers that their place here is dependent on their contract—if they lose their job, they’ll disappear—but he hasn’t seen it until now. He stares at his hand and tries to flex his missing pinky. Yeah. It’s really gone.

Josue shakily pulls out his phone. Googles, disappearing hand. A few posts talk about friends or coworkers getting fired and disappearing. There’s petitions asking for signatures to stop this kind of work since people disappear and are never heard from again. The last post he finds is a video of a guy saying he lost a few hours off his work schedule and his left arm vanished, then he worked so hard that he got his full hours back and his arm reappeared. Josue struggles to breathe. His whole body is trembling. Hot tears run down his face. He doesn’t want to trust that working will bring back his pinky. There has to be something else he can do.

A notification pops up with a message from his mom: it’s a picture of his two younger brothers. They’re wearing his stained and torn hand-me-down uniforms and holding old rice bags with their books poking out of the top. Tus hermanos van a empezar clases este mes, she writes. She won’t ask for more money, but it’s obvious they need new school materials.

Te mando mas este Sabado, Josue texts back.

The bus arrives. Josue takes the first empty seat and turns to look out the window so no one can see him crying. He’s been sending all his leftover money to his mom already. He stays in a converted garage with two other guys, rides the company bus, and gives the viejita he’s renting from money so she makes him cheap food—mostly rice, beans, and tortillas. He doesn’t have time to find extra work, so he’ll have to tell the viejita to make him less food. Josue buries his face in his hands.

A year ago, he was still in high school and dreaming about going to college and being a teacher. Then his dad died while working in the North. Afterward, Josue dropped out of school and worked with his uncles in the fields, but that barely made enough money for his mom and brothers to eat. He knew it was up to him to take care of them, so he found one of the company recruiters and signed a six-month contract. In turn, the company filed the legal paperwork and paid to bring him North. All Josue had to do was work. He wants       someone to talk to, but he can’t complain to his family because it’ll make them feel guilty. He has to figure this out on his own.

Josue walks past the middle school that reminds him of home because of the mural of an Azteca and the massive field full of guys playing futbol. Further down, he sees a guy and a girl, only a couple years younger than him, walking together. The bright yellow house near the end of the street has their curtain drawn and he watches the family sitting down to dinner. Josue wishes that he could think of his place like home, wishes that he had friends to play futbol with or a girl that he liked or even a family—but this place isn’t his home. He’s not here to build a life. Josue is here to work.

He turns onto his street. On the corner is the morenita who always sits in her yard on a wicker chair with a stack of books beside her.

“How are you today?” she calls to him.

“More or less,” Josue says.

The woman giggles. “I don’t think that saying translates well.” She must notice Josue’s shame at messing up, because she adds, “You could say ‘I’m okay’.”

“I’m okay,” Josue says. He continues walking past her house.

“Is today the day you sit with me?” she asks.

“I’m tired,” Josue says. “Hopefully tomorrow?” Josue wants to sit with her, but they’ve only ever spoken in passing and he’s scared of embarrassing himself more. In a parallel universe, he could get a job where he’d have time to rest and sit in her yard and she could tell him about her books and what she’s studying for anyway. But today, all he can think about is the pulsing pain in his left thumb, and how nothing happens when he flexes his missing pinky.

Josue finds Doña Linda, the viejita who he rents from, in the kitchen preparing a plate for him. He accepts the food and sits at the dining table. “I don’t need dinner after today,” Josue says. Doña Linda nods. She serves herself a plate and heads to her bedroom in the back of the house. Josue eats alone.

When he’s done, he cleans up the table, washes his plate, and goes in the garage. Doña Linda fixed the room up with real walls, a single window, and a makeshift bathroom in the corner. Josue shares the space with two men, and each of them has a twin bed along the wall opposite the bathroom. Neither are here, so Josue takes his time showering and getting into bed. He scrolls through his phone until the two men arrive. When they do, he sits up and puts down his phone, but neither acknowledge him. Josue lays back down, scrolling until exhaustion drags him to sleep.

Josue wakes up, gets dressed, and walks to the bus stop. There’s a group of people waiting, but he stands to the side of them. When the bus arrives, he sits by himself near the front. He tries to flex his left hand, but his thumb is stiff and his pinky is still missing. His three remaining fingers open and close. Josue’s breath shakes, and he closes his eyes to hold back tears. Usually, the bus ride to work goes fast, but Josue feels like he did the day he left home: he showed up to the pueblo centro like the company representative told him to and waited for a truck that took him to a bus that took him to another bus and another until the world around him went from dirt roads besides open fields and hills to manicured crop rows around the most buildings he’d ever seen together. All he thought about on that ride were his mom and brothers, each of them with faces that looked drained of life and joy. He was proud of sacrificing himself to keep them happy, but what would happen when there was nothing left of him to give?

John is at his desk by the door to the packing room, signing each worker’s mandatory check in. When Josue gets to the front, John asks, “You gonna earn your keep today?”

Josue nods and heads into the packing room. He stands at his spot on the line, facing the garage doors and the mountains and sky outside of them. A semi backs into the room, a guy pops open the door, and the forklift drivers unload pallets of broccoli boxes. Soon, towering stacks block Josue’s view of the outside. He pulls on his left glove, tenderly pushing his thumb in, and then he shoves the empty pinky into itself so that it won’t hang.

The machines roar to life. Broccoli comes down the conveyor. Josue grabs a couple. His left thumb twinges. He forces himself to move through the pain. The first bunches are fine—Josue is fine. He struggles to grab onto the bunches with his left hand, but his thumb is moving. He starts to get into a rhythm. Grab a couple. Rubber band them. Grab a couple. Rubber band them. Grab a couple. Rubber ba—they slip from his left hand. He reaches for them. But his thumb jambs into the belt. Pain explodes from his thumb. Fuck.

Bunch after bunch pass by untouched. The bundles he does manage to put together are messy—the rubber band is so low that it’ll come off, or one of the sticks is loose, or the band is pressing on the bushy top. Josue does his best to catch up, but he feels like he’s trying to scoop water back into a leaky bucket with a tiny spoon.

The woman across from Josue yells, “What are you doing?” Her job is to add Organic tags to Josue’s bunches, but she’s having to fix more and more of them.

Josue closes his eyes and tries to slow his hands. He needs to get back to his rhythm, but his hands refuse to move the way that he knows they can.

The guy filling boxes at the end of the line doesn’t have enough bunches to fill the next box. He must get tired of waiting because he moves to stand beside Josue, fixing bunches with him.

“I got it,” Josue says.

But the man ignores him, and continues grabbing bunches and banding them. Once there’s enough bunches, he moves back to his spot and packs a box. Then he comes right back to Josue.

During their lunch break, John finds Josue in a solitary corner of the break room and says, “Go home.”

“What?”

“Luis told me you’re slowing things down.”

Josue’s breath catches in his throat. “I need this job,” he says. His voice cracks and makes him sound like a whiny chiquillo.

“You’re not fired,” John says. There’s no emotion in his voice when he says it. He’s not angry, or really concerned at all. This conversation is nothing to him. Josue is nothing. “Not yet anyway. Come back tomorrow. With your shit together.”

Josue leaves. There’s no point arguing when other workers wanted him gone. Since it’s the middle of the day, Josue has to either wait for the evening bus or walk across town. He decides to walk.

Half a day is going to cost Josue a week’s groceries. He can skip a few meals and make his food last two weeks, maybe. He’ll figure it out and not tell his mom about any of this. Josue trips. He lands hard on his knees and rips open his palms.

“Fuck,” he yells. The skin on his hands is turning white even as blood drips onto the pavement. He doesn’t feel pain, yet, but he knows it’s coming. If he was barely able to get his work done today, what the hell is he going to do tomorrow?

Josue looks for whatever tripped him. The pavement is flat. There’s nothing that could have caused this, but Josue’s sure that he felt something with his foot. Except. He can’t move his toes. When he realizes this, all the air leaves Josue’s lungs. He unlaces his right shoe and pulls it off.

His right pinky toe is completely gone, and the next toe over is translucent.

Anger drains out of Josue. No, everything does. He’s tired. Too tired to even scream. He puts his shoe back on and practically runs home, feeling one toe after the other fade and disappear.

It takes him an hour to reach his street. He’s sure that all his toes are gone now, but he has enough of his foot left to make it home. He half-walks half-stumbles down his street. A trail of blood marks his path.

“Are you okay?” The morenita rushes over to him from her chair. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m okay,” Josue says, forcing a smile.

She reaches for Josue’s hand, but he pulls it away.

“What’s your name?” Josue asks her.

“Melanie.” She looks at Josue like he’s dying. It almost breaks him. He wants to collapse on the floor and tell her everything, but that wouldn’t fix anything.

“I’m Josue,” he says.

“Do you wanna sit down?” She points to her chair.

“Tomorrow,” Josue says. “I promise.”

Josue walks home. Doña Linda skipped his dinner like he told her to. He collapses onto his bed. Then he pulls out his phone and Googles, Where do disappearing workers go?

There are posts of people saying that their tío got fired and suddenly reappeared across the world in their homes. Others say that a cousin went North for work and no one ever heard from him again. There’s a page from the Worker Relations Board that says, Workers are sent back where they came from at the end of their contracts.

Josue cries into his pillow. He knows he can work hard enough to fix this and take care of his family like he’s supposed to, but what if he wakes up without an entire arm or leg? All anyone wants from him is work. He has to be able to work. He has to. He isn’t worth anything if he can’t.

The next morning, Josue checks his body. Nothing else is missing. He rubber bands a block of wood to the front of his half-foot. There’s nothing he can do to replace his missing pinky, but he makes a splint for his thumb out of leftover chopsticks and rubber bands. Neither of these solutions is great—he’s got a missing foot and a fucked-up finger—but he needs to work.

Josue walks onto the packing floor. He takes his spot on the line. The machines roar to life. Broccoli comes down the conveyor. Josue tries to pick up a couple, but his thumb doesn’t move the way he wants. The broccoli pass. Luis leaves his spot by the boxes and does Josue’s job again. Josue pushes him and picks up a bunch. He tries to rubber band it, but the bunch falls apart. Luis shoves Josue out of the way.

John comes up behind him and says, “That’s strike three, man. I have to let you go.”

Josue calls a car. He has the driver take him to the bank first, where he sends all the money he has left to his mom. Then Josue asks the driver to take him to his street. He watches the houses he’s walked by every day. Each house has so much life to it, especially the ones that seem to be older than even his mom. He wonders how many workers—people like him—have filled these houses with their dreams and exhaustion.

No one will miss him. There are so many more—people just like him—coming and going. Josue is just one of many, one among the endless number of workers who come to this valley to try and make a life for their families.

The driver pulls up in front of Doña Linda’s house. All the fingers on Josue’s left hand are gone already, and he knows the rest of him will soon follow. He stumbles down the street to Melanie’s house. She’s not in her chair. Josue stumbles up to it just as his right leg disappears up to his knee. He sits in her chair and looks out at the street.

He can see why she likes this spot so much—the sun is warming his back, he’s surrounded by trees and flowers, and he can see the kids playing in the park down the street. For the first time since coming North, Josue feels like he could live here. His other leg fades and disappears. Josue knows that if he closes his eyes, he’ll drift away and disappear completely. So he does. Josue closes his eyes and pretends that Melanie is sitting beside him. He enters that universe, where he makes a life for himself, and tells her, “Tell me what you’re always studying. I want to know your dreams.”