Mama’s strides back and forth make sun and shadow fall in rhythm: dark light dark light. A drumbeat or a heart. Benita glances up from the kitchen table and watches Mama press her mobile phone to her ear.
Benita is working on her project for school. She needs to draw something that means home. Though she knows her classmates will fill pages with tile-roofed houses, she’s chosen to draw a zunzuncito, the tiny bee hummingbird. To create an extra vivid emerald, she licks the tip of a green pencil to layer on top of blue. It tasted like a pebble on her tongue.
Beside the zunzuncito, she draws the zunzun, a regular-sized hummingbird, which is still smaller than many of Cuba’s butterflies.
Mama’s pacing slows and she begins to speak into the phone, explaining the letting agent’s email. There’s a pause and she squawks: “Reasonable! That much more rent every month?”
Benita knows what comes next. Their few belongings in boxes, with half abandoned where they stand. Nights on the sofas of friends from Mama’s English Language classes.
And, eventually, a new place with stale cigarette smoke hanging in thin curtains and fist-sized dents in the walls.
Another fresh start, in this country so far from Benita’s fire-headed papi and home.
She adds a dot of red to the fierce zunzuncito’s eyes to match that fire that burns inside her sometimes too.
Her school shoes already squeeze tight again. Everything here feels too small.
Scuffing her toes against the bumpy linoleum floor, she remembers her abuela’s balcony, the hot scent of lime trees growing in blue glazed pots, and the glitter of battling hummingbirds defending territory. From the kitchen she heard the chatter clatter of talk radio and Abuela laying out plates.
“Benitacita, lunch is ready!”
She felt those sounds and smells like water lifting her body.
The lowland forest hummed, its treetops hiding the ocean beyond.
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