Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Tales of a College Town Co-op Cashier” by Abi Diaz. Abi is a poet, essayist and MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Though raised in the American Midwest & South, they are proudly of Assyrian, Puerto Rican, Incan, Irish, and Spanish descent. Their work centers on reclaiming indigeneity, displacement, and queerness. When not writing, they cook for beloveds, tend to their plants, and play with their cat.
I.
“That’s a beautiful pin,” I said. The kind a Gen-Z celebrity might wear on the cover of a magazine, where she was styled in something they’d call grandma-core. Or like it was metal waiting to become exoskeleton, about to burst from this customer’s chest, to join her sisters in the rainforest.
“It was a gift from Peru,” she said.
“I write about butterflies in my poetry. I wrote a poem about a butterfly common in Peru. We have ancestry from there.” The poem, one about me and mama visiting the Cincinnati butterfly exhibit where an Owl butterfly, native to Peru and a few other Latin American countries, landed on me. Mama’s mother, who we called Abua, passed away over five years ago, and I look for her in every butterfly. There’s a superstition that butterflies are angels, and Abua’s father was born in Peru, so this woman’s Peruvian butterfly was God landing on my hand.
Her blue eyes twinkled. “That’s beautiful! If it wasn’t a gift from my dear friend, I’d give it to you right now.”
It’s the kind of bullshit thing someone might say, but I’ve been gullible since I was a kid, and she said it so convincingly, I believed her.
II.
A man gave me his member number to find his account in our system, and the last name Ochoa popped up. At some point, I’d asked Doris, my Quechua teacher, about Ochoa, our Peruvian family name. I wanted to understand what region our family was from, hoped the name held answers, but Doris said Ochoa might as well be Smith. I told her my great-grandfather was Incan. She said there are two main regions with that pride in their Indigenous roots, where they might still call themselves Incas, regions in the mountains refusing to sever their ties to our ancient empire. Our empire I’m trying to find inside myself.
It’s just butterflies to me now.
Doris was both butterfly and mountain, barely standing five feet tall. A kind woman, she said she wanted to read my poems with Quechua, thought it was beautiful I wanted to learn, offered to bring me back ingredients from Peru when she went. I met her when she taught a Quechua workshop to teach the basics of the language. We started with a full classroom of students, dwindled til the last weeks were just four of us: two linguistics students and two far-removed descendants of the language.
We learned the word for flowers, learned how Spanish flowers grew everywhere but the tops of our mountains. We learned little ways Spanish found its way into our language. There are two words for road: the way, in Quechua, a path carved out by our feet walking over it, generation after generation, and the street, in Spanish, those paving stones. We learned how our ancestors crushed corn into beer, made aswa, how still today it’s dried and crushed, allowed to ferment. For celebrations, it’s shared, rejoicing the world which gifts corn. We watched a documentary on how the water taught us to be, that our gods birthed us from water, so now we throw rocks into it, ask the water to bless us, ask the water to make us grow. We learned how we worship, how we worship water, how we worship lost lineages.
My whole life, I’ll be learning our history in pieces and grieving it. I’m searching for belonging, for understanding of our past, for a link to it, like in a Quechua class, where I learned how to feel butterflies in my pulse. I learned how to paint butterfly blood, learned my mouth is not the same as my tongue. By that I mean, the Spanish word for language means tongue, and the Quechua word for language means mouth. We learned how to dissect our Spanish tongues from our Quechua mouths. I learned one has wings, the other teeth.
I wondered if this customer had his own butterflies. “My great grandfather’s name was Ochoa, he was from Peru.” The man replied “It’s my wife’s last name, she’s Mexican. It’s originally from the Basque region in Spain actually. It means wolf.”
“Beautiful, I didn’t know that. We were probably colonized by the same family.” He laughed uneasily, like his chuckle drowned an apology. The response this probably-white man would have if he felt uncomfortable about something that wasn’t directly his fault. He was married to a brown woman, probably had mixed kids. Maybe he learned the history of their name so he could help them understand themselves. Hopefully he was not married to his wife because he thought her looks exotic. This crossed my mind despite this man being nice, despite this man not saying a single thing that made me uncomfortable, despite this man teaching me something precious and valuable about my history.
I was projecting. Based on the customers who said fetishizing things to me at the Co-op, based on my white father and brown mother. My white father not knowing the origins of our family names, not even knowing we had butterflies in our blood. A lifetime of him pointing to his brown children and thinking because he’s lived his life peripheral to his wife and kids, that meant he understands, because he was a student of sociology he is ‘woke,’ because he was woke before woke was a thing, because this customer knew his wife’s family name’s origin, because a white stranger had to teach me. After he left, I looked it up. He was right. Though lobo is Spanish for wolf, in Catalan, Ochoa derives from the wolf. I hadn’t thought to look up our name. I’d asked Doris, but I didn’t check myself.
The rest of that shift I imagined us, the descendants of wolves spread across Latin America, now lost in the United States, howling to a moon across the ocean. I wondered if I howled if the moon would howl back. I wondered if it came to us through violence or through love. I wondered if wolves often eat butterflies, or if it’s like hitting a butterfly with a windshield—our deaths just collateral. I wondered if you mix a wolf with a butterfly if it inherits wings, or if it inherits fangs, wondered why I have no killer instinct.
III.
“You should know you look like a model, no rizz version though.” My co-worker, Tommy said, as he walked toward the register. Rizz, slang for charisma, was most obnoxious when used by a 6’2 white boy whose spiked-up too-blonde-to-be natural hair was awfully reminiscent of a terrible 2010 boy-band singer. Tommy had been filling his third coffee of the day, which he’d leave unfinished behind the counter for someone else to throw away after he left for the day.
My usual eye roll, incited him to say “No rizz, can’t have you thinking it’s something it’s not.” Like I didn’t know what he meant, like his comments about how all his ex-girlfriends spoke Spanish or how wavy hair is the prettiest didn’t go over my head, or “you have such captivating eyes, no rizz version though” all missed their mark.
Like adding no rizz makes it meaningless, like he was better than the old men customers who constantly winked at me, made little comments about my beauty, who’d ask me out while I was stuck behind the counter being polite. Tommy thought it was funny to tell me about how Ian, another co-worker, mentioned to him that Ian & I had matched on Tinder over a year ago, where I had messaged to say something in his profile was culturally insensitive. I don’t remember the profile or the message, but it’s something I’d do. Tommy, said “can’t believe you’d swiped right on that balding-ass man.”
Ian and I were behind the counter the next morning, when a man I was ringing up told me “You look like this actress, I can’t remember her name, but every time I see you, I think about it. She’s really pretty.”
I said “Oh. Thank you.”
After he left, I turned to my coworker, and repeated what he’d said, trying to complain. These types of comments were frequent at the Co-op: he daily barrage of men who’d say I was pretty, who’d wink at me while I scanned their groceries, who’d ask me out while I was stuck behind the counter being polite. Add that to my years of boys and then men who thought calling me exotic was a compliment, and I was sick of it.
Ian’s response “He probably meant Salma Hayek.” This same man told me how one of the regulars, a yoga instructor and he had been going on dates around the same time his current girlfriend and he started dating, said even though he was more physically attracted to the yoga instructor, he still ended up with his current girlfriend. So, I should’ve known better than to complain to him.
I wished I’d been a wolf that day, wish I’d bared my teeth, wish I’d howled and snarled, wished I’d said, “you fetishizing fucker, I look nothing like Salma Hayek.”
Instead, I laughed uneasily, said “I don’t think so.”
IV.
The longest day of the year, a few poet-friends gathered at the Spot, a library/workspace my writing mentor let the MFA students use. One wall was covered in overflowing bookshelves, boxes on the floor from books he had been sent, his printing press against the back wall, and a big table filling most of the room, often covered in random books and knick-knacks. Over the course of the summer, some variation of our group would occupy this space. Near the start of the summer, we cleaned it. In the process, I had broken a small bowl filled with various rocks, pushpins, a spare fortune cookie. I’d read there quietly after work. Another day, we’d watercolored. I’d been painting naked self-portraits, which started as a class project, a chap-book of poems and paintings in conversation with literature and theory from class. These were paintings of my body by myself and my femme friends and my girlfriend as a way to reclaim my body outside of the male gaze.
I’d kept painting them after the class ended; an obsession with my own form, with understanding the difference between flesh and sex, between body and personhood. That day in the Spot, I painted a nude image of my stomach and my chest, carving out where the fat hung in crude shadow, reminding myself what I painted was mine. Even when a lover touched me or when these butterflies leave my stomach or when my attention is butterflies in rain. Even when they find their storm-shelter thousands of miles away in a place I’ve never been, a place I only know in dreams. I only know because of butterflies inside me. Even when those men’s eyes bore into me, these men trying to imagine what I looked like without butterflies. I covered my body in wings. My clothes are a thousand flaps. That’s a lie: I paint bare skin.
However, this day, we poets were performing a ritual. We were together, a group of poet-witches animating exquisite corpses. Line by line, we created nonsense. Magical odd stories weirder each addition—a car crash, awkwardness, angry mothers, laughter, laughter, laughter. The open door releasing our chorus of joy into the warm night, accidentally drawing moths to our light. Ian walked past, stopped and said “Abi?”
“Hey.” He basked in our light on the sidewalk, let it wash over him before he kept walking. We closed the door.
Butterflies are descendants of moths. More accurately, their ancestors; we evolved from them. We decided we didn’t want to burn our wings trying to find light. Now, we traverse flowers, like them we build chrysalises, sacred homes, churches of transformation, like them we change form. We cast spells on flowers.
Moth larvae eat through paper, destroy our stories with prying mouths.
This was a sacred place, a place somehow those cruel wings invaded. I was paper that night, I was realizing community comes with the light and the moths and the paper, realizing it was a closed circle. We, poet witches, create another world, where moths can’t lay eggs, can’t eat through our spells.
V.
“¡Quiero sushi! ¡Quiero sushi!” A girl around six with dark brown hair and a persistent voice. She was loud, getting louder as an old man, seemed to shrug her off. The woman, I assumed to be her mother, was at the salad bar, covering our thick white plastic plates in greens and veggies, with a boy a little older than the girl, while the old man ladled soup into a bowl.
“¡¡¡QUIERO SUSHI!!!” at this scream someone pulled her to the cold bar, in her little hands she clutched the black plastic of pre-packaged sushi. It was cute, her little scream, her excitement. They came to check out, salads and soups for everyone, besides her. The man told me he’s their grandfather, says he’s visiting from Peru, how he’s sorry she was yelling. He was on the taller side, with kind eyes and a slight accent, his hair which looked once dark but now mostly gray, his skin paler, but not white.
“No it’s ok, it’s cute she just really wanted that sushi.”
“¿Ah, hablas español?”
My “un pocito, lo siento, mi mami couldn’t teach me, but I have ancestry from Peru and Puerto Rico.” The same conversation I had with the woman who I recognized as the owner of Pilly’s Party tacos, who first spoke to me in Spanish, who laughed at my attempt, who came in for breakfast once a week, who I didn’t charge for coffee when no one else was around. He called his granddaughter over, said “here speak Spanish. The cashier needs a little practice.”
I asked “¿Quieres sushi? Es muy rico ¿si?”
She looked blankly at me. Her grandfather said, “this child will have the most delicious dishes in front of her, but all she wants is Japanese food.”
As they were eating, the children got louder and louder until the clatter of a soup dish hitting the ground, sending the remnants of soup splatters around the base of their table. I hurried over to help clean up. After they left, my coworker said, “thank God for the quiet!”
But I was sad they were gone, the comfort of their Spanish, of their brown-ness in a space this white. I’d spent my summer thankful for any chance at any chance to feel less isolated, looking for butterflies in the faces of strangers, even looking for wolves.
I’ve been told I have no volume control for as long as I can remember. My father at the dinner saying I didn’t have to shout when excited. Teachers in school saying quiet down. I never saw it as a problem, until I was told. Mama’s family was unashamedly loud, yelling as an expression of emotion. They’d shout at each other in Assyrian, and I hardly ever knew what they were saying, but despite the loudness, it was clear it came from a place of love.
I’m still loud, no amount of conditioning could quiet me, as much as I once wished it could. But despite my volume, I still make myself small. This girl hadn’t been shamed into smallness yet, didn’t know this space was never designed for her. Her voice, her loud declarations were beautiful. She knew what she wanted, what she didn’t. Though I didn’t see the soup dish fall, part of me hopes she flipped it, hopes her grandfather said, “here just taste it, I’m sure you’ll like it” and her response was the child equivalent of “Fuck you! I know what I don’t like.”
Her screams felt light, like setting butterflies loose, like letting those butterflies howl.
VI.
Lynn came in once or twice a week. She was a local artist, a magic older woman wearing eccentric patterned dresses and shirts, patterns I’m sure any day now would escape her fabric and find their way back into her paintings. She’d get lunch and a treat, often a rose-flavored yogurt in a robin’s egg ceramic pot. I told her “There’s a woman who says she buys these just to plant seedlings in them.”
In her dream-like voice she almost sang “I love rose, I love any floral dessert.”
I recommended she try our coconut cocoa bars, told her they’re my favorite, told her they’re on sale, told her we have a lavender-rose one. She’d sit just behind me at the register, when I wasn’t checking out customers we’d laugh and chat. So many of our customers were around Lynn’s age, were here just to talk while they ate, were here to find the kind of community we all need. Like that robin egg pot could hatch into a flock of birds chirping to each other, and that’s what talking to Lynn was like, a symphony of birdsongs.
VII.
“That’s a beautiful tattoo.”
The woman looked at me, her face serene, her eyes which looked almost gray seemed to be searching. “Thanks. It’s for my son, he died. I saw one recently, on the other side of the window in my living room, he was looking right into my eyes, I swear he was coming back to visit, to say hello.”
I wanted to cry, but the woman seemed joyful, happy to look into his eyes again. I imagined it, a woman racked with grief, who gave birth to a bird, who found its blinking yellow before her window. That bird which didn’t fly away when it saw her, but carved his wings into her skin, who is trying to teach her how to grow her own wings.
My grandmother would flutter. Abua’s apartment was filled with plants, an ecosystem she created, granted herself something to pollinate. She didn’t have a yard to grow the garden she wanted like when mama was little. Mama said it was something Abua grieved, long before she died.
Now she’s just butterflies. Now she’s floating, waiting for the moment when we beg to not let the wind carry her away. I know Abua wasn’t only butterflies, but the plants she grew and the wind on which she now carries herself away.
I said to the woman, “that’s beautiful, I hope he comes back often.” She said something like “Thanks, I know he will.”
Grief anamorphizes; by that I mean grief is an animal. We are animals, searching for ways to grieve our loved ones gone, but we’re grieving ourselves too. We’re grieving our ancestors we’ll never know, the lessons they’ve learned and could have taught us. We’re grieving our pasts we’ll never know how to trace back to our start. We’re grieving the us we would have been had we been born with beaks instead of teeth, the us we would have been had we been born with wings.
Gorgeous wondrous prose
"Though lobo is Spanish for wolf, in Catalan, Ochoa derives from the wolf."
ochoa is from euskera/basque, not catalan