Dust Motes
by Richard Tillinghast

Assumption
by Molly Giles

Hard to Believe
by Charlie Geer

Assumption
    Molly Giles

Mary had had it. The kids—kids?! Seth was forty and Stefani was forty-
one—had been fighting since San Cristóbol. “You are.” “I am not.” “Yes you are.” Sitting in the back seat of the cramped rental car, Mary translated their back-and-forth invectives into Spanish for the softness, the quick prettiness of the language, but her pulse still beat with impatience and her stomach churned and curdled. “Would you both knock it off?” she said at last. “This is supposed to be a fun trip.”
    “Mother,” Stefani warned. Mary shrugged and turned her hearing aid off. Seth had a large gray mole on the back of his neck that trembled when he shouted, she noticed, and Stefani flipped her hair around like a horse swatting flies. They had been a beautiful couple when they first married, but they were a haggard, adulterous, materialistic twosome now. It was not her fault. Not her business.
    You don’t need a bigger car—Mary read Seth’s lips as he turned in profile, mole bobbing—You need a fucking U-Haul. And Stefani, equally unimaginative, replied, What I need is a man who isn’t a fucking miser.
    If we did nothing else right, Mary thought, Stefani’s father and I knew how to fight. Didn’t Stefani know that Seth got a deal on this rental car? Didn’t Seth know that Stefani shopped? Mary sat jammed among garden urns, a wrought-iron wine rack that had somehow been torched to look rusted, a pile of woven rugs, three hammocks, and several extremely sharp-edged tin mirrors that, stacked in the seat beside her, reflected her face upside down, making her slight double chin a triple monster and all the hairs on it long as silver boar bristles. She regarded her reflection, remembering the handsome old boatman who had given her a wink as he oared her and the kids through a lake strangled with floating lilies.
    She turned to the window. The mountains in this part of Chiapas were exquisite. Smoky blue. The air outside, she thought wistfully, probably smelled of that smoke—blue woodsmoke from dinner fires, small good dinners of roasted corn and chicken marinated in limes and chilies; she’d never breathe in those smells because Stefani insisted on keeping windows up, AC on. Speeding, Seth swung around stocky Mayan women in embroidered blouses walking single file along the edge of the forest, dark-faced men bicycling back to their villages. Every now and then a few shacks appeared and disappeared. Mary waved to the children standing in their dusty yards with their dogs and their pigs, but they didn’t wave back—why should they? Just another old American lady passing by.

Continued in volume 42, issue 3, summer 2006