Moonlight at the Tiendita
by Leslie Wilber
Magda was an outcast: The La Michoacana girls were frosty and cliquish, secluded in their freezer case, and she never understood the details of the lovers’ spat between Cholula and Tapatío. This is what happens, she thought, when Nestlé buys your parent: you—an unpopular Polish prune cookie—end up in an Albuquerque tiendita, where no one can explain how you got there, and certainly no one wants you around.
But the piñatas weren’t like that; they couldn’t be snobs. They were fucked-up Spidermen, unicorns or dinosaurs grafted to donkey chaises, or traditional stars themed after American movies. Everyone acknowledged they came from Mexico, sure, but these piñatas had been through the goddamned wringer and come out ghoulish, lopsided Pan-American citizens.
Chuy, a dented attempt at the Hulk, dangled beside Magda’s display box. After months of silence, he whispered, “The moon, isn’t it beautiful?”
Living near the register, they had a good view out the big window, but Magda had never noticed the moon before. That night, it was neon and huge, close to the horizon.
“I suppose it’s a beautiful moon,” she said.
“I like looking at the moon, and thinking about it,” Chuy said. “You hear people talk about it all the time. I’d like to see the moon over the ocean. The reflection is supposed to be tremendous.”
Magda never heard anyone talking about the moon, but she didn’t tell Chuy. She wasn’t yet sure what would bind their friendship. Perhaps it was a floss of agreement about the moon.
The next night, she held her breath while the shopkeeper swept, counted out the register, and wiped the counters. She had a couple of hours until she and Chuy would have any privacy. She watched the moon creep over the row of houses across the street.
“It’s smaller tonight,” Magda said, as soon as the shopkeeper locked the doors behind him.
“That’s what happens,” Chuy said. “It grows and grows, then it shrinks and it shrinks, until it’s hardly there at all.”
Magda said, “I wonder why?”
“It’s the moon. Who understands what it’s up to?”
They talked every night. Magda described the flames and steam of the cookie factory, the swaying shipping container of her adolescence, and the bright, dry confusion of her early days in New Mexico. Chuy tried to recall the headlines on the newspapers under his skin, the skilled hands applying colored paper and paint over top. He told Magda about the day the shopkeeper hung him in the window, and how his left side felt after years of sun bleaching.
“What if I told you I want you inside me, Magda?” Chuy asked one night.
For a moment, Magda thought she would crumble: rattling around Chuy’s darkness, rocking and bumping against his papery insides. They’d touched only a handful of times when the shopkeeper pulled Chuy down for a customer to inspect. His foot had bumped against her, or the back of his thigh. Once, a young mother rotated Chuy to see his backside, and his hand brushed over the top of Magda’s wrapper, his fingers tracing her folds. Her sticky prune center quivered. There were people in the store, so Chuy swallowed his sigh.
“I’d say I want to be inside you,” Magda said. “Tell me what it would be like.”
“Magda, I want you so badly I’d peel back my scalp so you could slide into my mind. I’d let you in me as deep as you could go. You’d plunge through my center, your cellophane against my newsprint, touching every inch of me, and settle down in my toes. I wish that could happen for us, Magda.”
Magda wished she could reach up from her display box and stroke her swaying love. That she could inspect his faded left cheek, then caress it from the inside as she slid through the back of his head, down into his guts. She wondered what the newsprint would tell her that she didn’t already know.
There is no happy ending for a piñata; either he serves his purpose, or he remains an empty husk. Chuy had been written off as damaged inventory, but he was good enough for the shopkeeper’s nephew’s seventh birthday party. Chuy’s face rested millimeters from Magda as he waited to be stuffed. If his arms moved, he could have torn off her packaging. If he had a tongue he could have reached out to taste her. She stared back up at him, the condensation inside her wrapper gathering around her eyes.
“This is our chance, Magda,” Chuy said.
“No,” Magda said. “He won’t pick me. No child wants a prune cookie at their birthday party.”
She watched the shopkeeper scoop the de la Rosas and the Bimbos into the hole in the back of Chuy’s head. She winced to hear them drumming against his insides. His body jerked, defeated, as they fell.
“This isn’t what I wanted, Magda,” he said.
“I know, my love. I know.”
The party was right there, in the tiendita parking lot. The shopkeeper hired a clown and a bounce castle. Children devoured a rainbow of the La Michoacana girls. Magda saw when it was time for the piñata. The big window framed the whole thing, but she couldn’t watch. She could only close her eyes and imagine Chuy’s torn, upturned face, crushed into the asphalt, and how perfectly it could watch the moon.
LESLIE WILBER
Leslie writes short stories and occasionally journalism. Leslie is an MFA student at West Virginia University, where she is also an editor at the Cheat River Review. Her fiction has appeared in Defunct Magazine and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
