Sixty Percent Water

Issue 51 • Spring 2025 • Fiction

This story won first place in the Spring 2025 Fiction Contest judged by Fernando Flores, who wrote: “This story has a starkly individual voice that leaves you wanting more. It’s the kind of story one hopes to read when judging a contest such as this one. I look forward to reading other works from this author in the future.”

her

She came into my house with her hair in a curly bun, a small-time drug dealer selling weed to my roommate. She was on a bike which she leaned on the concrete bed that surrounded the thick trunk of our palm tree. No helmet. I asked her what was on her arms. These are the names of my dead pets, she said in a voice too big for her body. My arms will be an ever-growing mausoleum of dead pet tattoos. I asked her if she wanted something to eat. I wanted her to take something of mine, something that might make her stay just a little while longer.

salvation

Things I’ve believed might lead to my salvation:

1. Proper hydration
2. Jesus Christ
3. The psalms in my teen bible with a skateboarder on the cover
4. Skateboarding
5. Sprinting up hills
6. Getting my heart broken
7. Finding and correcting a vitamin deficiency
8. Cutting off all my long brown hair
9. Droplets of flower essence
10. Breathing differently in accordance with modern science
11. Pharmaceuticals designed in a lab
12. Loving someone fully
13. Finding the right glasses

fish

I’ve been fishing a few times, always with my father. The first time, we went to a sure-catch pond near where I grew up. I caught a catfish. I think I caught a catfish. I remember very little of this. I was hardly tall enough to peer over the raised edge of the pond. I couldn’t see what I was doing, who I was hooking. I think we ate it for dinner. I cannot remember if this is true, or what I felt when I ate it, if I ate it at all.

In the many years that passed between this trip and the next, people would ask me if I had ever been fishing. Sort of, I would say. I would tell them it was a sure-catch pond. I would tell them I hardly remember it. I cannot remember any hooks, any blood, any horror. Just a little girl with a father standing behind her, guiding her pole.

her

She watched my dog while I was gone. It was a comfort to me, imagining her there with my little one. She brought her to the pet store. I know the perfect indestructible bone that will survive her forceful jaws. Back at the house, she sent me a video, singing a song in a high-pitched voice she thought sounded like my dog, lovedrunk on bone. Ya no hay vidaaaaaa antes de mi hueso. Yo pensé que era feliiiiiiiz, pero no sabía esto. She had a beautiful voice, even while speaking dog. She was a classically trained singer. She also translated aquatic wildlife documentaries. I’ve got to go to work for the ocean, she would say. There are tuna tales to be told. She would match the timing of her translations so precisely, people’s mouths moved almost exactly in sync with the dubbed audio. It even looks like the fish speak Spanish, she said. When she would leave for work, I’d wish her good luck with the tuna and try to think of something to say about fish that might endear me to her.

thirst

Receptacles I’ve drank from include:

1. Bottles
2. Short plastic cups with bite marks on them (one red, one blue)
3. Rivers (on purpose, on accident)
4. Oceans (on accident)
5. Tiny spoons I carved out of baby carrots with my fingernails
6. Off-brand CamelBaks from my mother’s work
7. Puddles on the ground (was desperate)
8. A chalice held to my lips
9. My own hands cupped together
10. Tiny eyedropper
11. Her favorite mug in the shape of a soccer ball
12. Barbie tea set
13. A supposedly indestructible Nalgene

telekinesis

People say you can charge water with your thoughts, good or bad. There are celebrities who say it’s their secret to success, who shout into their bathtubs before stepping in. Years ago, Doctor Masaru Emoto performed experiments on rice and water, gripping public consciousness. He put rice into three beakers, then poured water over the top. One beaker he labeled with kind words, thank-you words, loving words. He told this batch of rice that he appreciated it every day. The next he labeled with hate words, and this rice he disparaged, hurling insults at it as it stood helpless next to the appreciated rice. The third rice he ignored completely. In several months’ time, the loved rice was happy and bubbly, the hated rice was crusty and black, but the ignored rice fared worst of all—it became moldy and wretched. Emoto photographed the cells under a microscope to show the beautiful crystalline regularity of the loved molecules and the ugly asymmetry of the hated and ignored molecules. Water is the mirror of the mind, he said.

my baby

I feel most like a mother when she meets my eyes after I say aguita. She sits as I pull out her collapsible orange bowl from my backpack, uncrinkle its little accordion walls, and fill it, proffering it to my babygirl. I hold it up and angle it to the height of her head. Sometimes she licks my leg afterwards as if to say, thnk u, ws thrsty. Other times, when there are animals near, she flits her eyes left to right as she drinks and bares her teeth at any dog who looks her way. She drinks voraciously, spitefully, more than she would out of thirst alone. Enseñar el diente means to show your teeth, but I mistranslate it when I speak in her voice. I’m gonna teach you my tooth! I say for her. 

her

She cried one night over noodles. We bought the noodles, delivery, my treat, but they tasted wrong to her. I was convinced I could fix them. Let me do it, I said, throwing them on the frying pan with sesame oil and chili flakes. My hands moved quickly, grasping at the ingredients like they were an extension of my body. As I moved around, she grew upset. You’re not listening to me, she said. This isn’t what I wanted. There were tears forming in her eyes. She needed me to leave.

I walked outside, and as I left, I became aware of a thick string hooked into my chest, connected to her, growing taut and aching as I stepped further and further from the kitchen. To pass the time, I threw the tennis ball for my baby. The string kept pulling. I could hear her running the noodles through my strainer, rinsing off the sauce, drying her tears. At last, she came outside to face me, silent. I’m sorry, I said. I’m sorry I didn’t listen. She opened her arms and I dropped the tennis ball to enter her embrace. The string in my chest slackened as our bodies settled into contact. We went inside and she chewed her noodles wordlessly while I sat. Halfway through, she took a breath and faced me. You have to listen to me, she said. I knew how I needed the noodles. 

salvation

There are rocks in the river, because there are rocks in every river, and if you are swimming, you have to keep your feet ahead of you, legs bent, braced for impact. As a child, I’d go with my cousins to Feather River, a glittering place where the shore sparkled with fool’s gold. There were giant boulders near the river that my cousins would clamber up, and I would do my best to follow. One by one, they jumped off the biggest rock and into the river, bold and unafraid. I stood frightened and frozen, the last one. Finally, I jumped. Slapped by the impact, shocked by the cold, I forgot to put my legs ahead of me. The current carried my little body down and down, first fast, then slower as the river shallowed and stilled. My cousins spent the day running up the boulders and jumping off of them, over and over again. By the end of the day, I was sure I’d loved it all along.

her

She would wait until she was immeasurably thirsty and then down a whole glass of water in one breath. Her lungs heaved as she looked at the empty glass. I envied the depth of her thirst. She’d put two sachets of tea in every cup, to concentrate the flavor.

One day I brought over a salsa I’d made, dried chiles blended together with peanuts and oil. She ate it by the spoonful, face in ecstasy, over and over again until she had to run around the house to let out the steam. She told me it was perfect, delicious, that I could get my Mexican residency with this alone. Just walk up to the consulate tomorrow and give them a jar. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and dipped the spoon in again. It is so spicy but I can’t stop eating it. I loved that I could make her voracious.

salvation

When we bless each other, when we bless the food we eat, we pray to become more perfect substances. When we ingest beautiful foods, we can become beautiful crystals. Everyone wants to be beautiful inside. Everyone wants to eat something perfect and crystalline and let it act upon the black box of our bodies.

fish

The second time I went fishing, I was on a backpacking trip with my father and his best friend. We hiked long days and drank whiskey and hot cocoa around the fire at night. I knew it made my father proud that I could do these things. I was never made to feel less for not being a son. My father and his friend wanted to catch fish to supplement the food we’d packed, so on the third day, we went out to a big lake. I was already a vegetarian at that point, but I went to the lake with them anyway, climbed my way onto a rock that jutted into the lake, near a spot where they saw the fish jumping. For a long while I only watched them, until at last I bent to my father’s wishes and agreed to cast out my pole. Almost right away, a small fish bit my line, and when I reeled it up enough to look at it, it thrashed around, flailing to get free, and my limbs froze. Let it go, please let it go, I begged my father. I did not know how to do this myself. My father held it up on the line and I saw how the effort had already wrecked its little wet body—there was a bleeding gash right in its middle. My father pulled it off the hook and dropped it back in the water, and I watched a red ribbon follow it as it swam away. I didn’t ask him if it would live.

That night, they cooked the other small fish they’d caught over the fire in packets of aluminum foil filled with oil and salt and pepper. Try just a little bit, they wheedled. I hesitated, preparing a defense that did not exit my mouth. OK, I said. I took a piece and chewed, hating my tongue for the saliva that rushed forth, readying my throat to swallow it down.

my baby

When I talk to my dog, I say all the things I hate for people to say to me: sweet girl, pretty girl, nice girl, angel girl. She wags her tail, bends her ears backward, and presses her face into my legs. Yes, I am all this that you say, she says with her eyes—up-turned, amber, certain that anything that comes from me must be good.

Together, we go north to visit my father. I sit on the floor reading a book and she curls next to me, head on my lap. Even while she is asleep, there is always a piece of her in contact with me, alert to any small shudder. My father enters the room and plugs in the vacuum cleaner. As soon as the sound comes on, she wakes, the fur on her back raised—

threat

threat

My father pushes the vacuum cleaner towards me and she pounces, biting hard at its little plastic wheels. He laughs, pulling the vacuum cleaner back towards him. Her eyes are fixed on the machine, measuring its distance to us, tracking all of our positions in space. She’s protecting you, my father says, approval in his voice.

I see a film in my head: my little one lunging at the thing again, ferociousness redoubled, and every tooth in her mouth breaks as she bites. I see her long canines snapping in half, I see the splintered shards of her molars falling out, I see her tiny front teeth bent diagonal, like a nail you hit wrong into a wall with a hammer. She cries, even though she never cries, and I bring her to the vet’s office where a man in blue scrubs tells me she’ll always be in pain. I imagine myself day after day brushing at the remains of her teeth as she wrenches her head away from me because it hurts, it hurts to be cleaned where you’re raw and broken. I’m sorry, angel, I say to her, but an apology is not an apology when you have no plans to stop.

My father pushes the vacuum cleaner towards us again. Before she can lunge, I grab her collar and pull her into me tight. No, baby, I say. I can feel her rib cage breathing heavy against my arms, the strength of her chest pushing out towards the machine, but I don’t let go.

her

I was floating down a river, but I could no longer see my feet. This is how people die—their feet catch and they are pulled down, helpless against the current. I can’t see you for a while, I said. She let out a breath. OK, she replied. Just give me a song to remember you by. I’ll learn it on the guitar when I miss you. 

I sent her a song. I knew you’d pick Dolly. As she learned it, I tried to pull myself together. Don’t do this to yourself again. But I already knew that when she sang to me, I’d stop thinking about what it would feel like for a body to drown.

telekinesis

There are multitudes of people who have tried to recreate Emoto’s experiment. In the online forums dedicated to the subject, some tear him down as the biggest of all possible frauds while others claim the experiment has worked for them many times. College professors with PhDs run this experiment with their classes year after year. The public is fascinated. What kind of rice and how much, people ask one another on the forums. Science does say our intentions are powerful. From far away, I ask my mother to pray for me.

her

The fights I’ve witnessed include:

1. The time she yelled at the dude outside of Los Tacolotes because he was watching us dance.
2. The time a lady insulted my baby at the dog park, and her retorts got the lady so heated she called my dog a filthy mixed breed.
3. The time the man looked us up and down on the street as we held hands. Have you ever seen legs before, pendejo?
4. The time in the café when a guy whipped out his dick to pee in a potted plant, so she pulled his glasses off his face and stomped them into the ground until they were useless.

Her ex had a running joke: where when she got angry, her ex would say Hulk mad! After the come-down, she’d apologize for getting Hulk-crazy. But it wasn’t a joke to me, she said. I was ashamed. She reached for my hand. You don’t make me feel like a monster. 

salvation

I used to think there was no limit to how long I could swim. If I could paddle a hundred meters, I could paddle a thousand, ten thousand, more. I couldn’t imagine a barrier capable of stopping me. I looked on a map, where I lived and where my grandmother lived. Drop me into the ocean, I told my parents. I’ll swim there. I am soothed by the feeling of resistance against my arms, by the full range of muscles that must act upon something to push or to pull.

her

There are things you do that are hard for me, I told her. Can we talk about it? 

Yes, she said, snapping her face towards me in attention. I pulled out my notebook where I had listed the points I knew I’d forget. The paper drank in the sweat on my fingers, curling upwards.

Okay, I started.

Wait! She ran out of the room. I looked down at the grain of the wood floors. How could I let so much of me leak out of my body where I can no longer watch over it, I thought. My handwriting looked ugly and childish on the page.

I’m back, she said, racing into the room, her own purple notebook under her armpit, pen tucked into the pocket of her pants. She sat down across from me, flipping for the next open page, then pulled the pen out of her pants and looked up at me. I’ll write it down so I remember.

the Hulk

The Hulk is a sad man. He cannot control his emotions. He resents his alter ego. He does not want to be constantly ripping out of his clothes to turn big and green time and time again. The Hulk has not been properly diagnosed and treated. The Hulk has not been given the right flower essence. The Hulk only wants to go home and have a quiet dinner in front of his TV, watching something calm, like a nature documentary.

fish

The third time we went fishing, my dad and I were out on a boat off the coast of the Pacific Ocean with two fishermen, father and son. He stationed himself at the back of the boat, where the fishing chair was, and I went up to the front and crossed my legs on the bow. I looked off to the side where hundreds of dolphins were following us, dipping in and out of the water, swimming in a big V in our wake. My father wanted nothing more than to catch a fish in the ocean. I hoped for one too, in the way children hope their fathers’ dreams come true even if they’re made sick by them.

When it came, it was enormous, thrashing its blue and greengold scales as it twisted over the boat. The fishermen cut it loose and it flopped onto the deck. They brought out a club and began whacking the fish over the head, over and over, club raised high into the air before it crashed down. I didn’t realize a fish had to be whacked. High on the catch, my dad told me to try it myself, to sit in the fishing spot and cast a line. I lowered my body into the chair, smelling blood and fish. I cast the line out and reeled it in: empty. Try again, he told me. No, I said. Nothing I did could hurt him today, not even this. No. I climbed back up to the front of the boat to watch the dolphins. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad asking the fishermen how big they thought it was, how heavy, asking fish questions. He mimed with his hands, held up fingers, and they understood each other with the ease of men in their domain. They didn’t need me to translate. I counted the dolphins.

This fish I ate without hesitation. I minced the garlic.

her

The things I want to yell at her but do not. Why is it that you will not:

1. Take your medications
2. Stop adopting so many dogs
3. Stop yelling at your mother
4. Drink water in the mornings instead of something bad for you
5. Finish your work on time
6. Stop trying to save me

not her

While we weren’t talking, I went on a date with not-her. Not-her was pretty, soft-voiced, tall with a slow walk. One dog, one cat.

I told her, let’s play a game. I gave her three words: fuerza, tamaño, paz. She gave me three words back: gato, bici, plantas. Shoddy and emphatic, I drew a wild and tendrilled plant struggling to operate a bike with its many ill-adapted limbs, crashing forward down a thick path through a forest. At the end of the path, tiny-tiny in the distance, a cat on its own little cat-bike, waiting, a picnic basket packed, and within that picnic basket, something that emanated with light. My idea was beyond my capacity to execute it, and came out in a smudgy tangle of colored pencils. While I was drawing, I saw her pull up a reference image of the Hulk on her iPhone and drew it to proportional accuracy. I love the Hulk, she said. I was far away in my mind, but I kissed her anyway because maybe this is what it takes to not hurt so much.

my baby

She destroyed the indestructible bone. Left shards on the floor which I cleaned, frantically, imagining spikes and tears in her esophagus, her tiny gasping cry, a bloody confusion, one last attempt at a cough before she collapses onto the floor, her spotted barrel chest still.

Sometimes when I imagine all the ways she might die, I pray that one of them will at last come true, that it will all end so that I can stop being afraid. I am prepared to weather the grief of her death, which will come at the hands of my own negligence: a stovetop left on, a sharp thing left out, an empty water bowl in the desert heat. I am prepared for the relief coated in guilt, a bitter goodbye to the thing I loved too much. I look down at my arms, where I might place her name.

telekinesis

In the online forums, one of Emoto’s followers posts an article about chickens and telekinesis, by researcher Rene Peoc’h. Peoc’h made a little cylindrical robot that could roll around on little wheels. It had a short pen on its underbelly which traced its path. He programmed it to move randomly, erratically. He placed it in the middle of an enclosure and its route was this:

Then came the baby chicks. Chickens and all birds believe the first animate creature or thing they see after hatching is their parent and become closely bonded, he wrote. Peoc’h introduced the newly hatched chicks to his special wheely robot. They loved it and yearned to be close to it. He placed the wheely robot in the enclosure again, this time with the 15 bonded baby chicks in tow, and its route was this:

The motherbot stayed close to her chicks, who became anxious when she left. Though the motherbot had no feelings of her own, the chickens kept her close by controlling her with their minds, begging for nearness. In the control group, random chicks not bonded with the motherbot did not generate the same result. She moved freely, randomly, not a care in the world.

her

She spoke in absolutes, a life history in always and never. I couldn’t tell whose grayscale was distorted. I tested the sound of her through the voice of my baby. Baby *never* get to go to the parque. Mother *always* working on computer. Baby *never* get a treat. Mother *always* leaving baby. My baby stares up at me, wanting something badly that I am unable to decipher. That’s not true, baby, I tell her. We do go to the park. She keeps staring. We didn’t and we never. I jump down from my bed and place my hands on her back. Just show me what you need and I’ll follow you, I try to tell her. Help me understand. She shakes me off and barks because I don’t get it, I never get it. She slumps back onto the bed, a heavy sigh leaving her body. I crawl towards her, pull her head in my lap, tell her I’m sorry. She licks at my tears, pushing her wet nose into my hot face, like I was always the one who had been upset.

the Hulk

There is a story my grandmother used to read to me and my cousins from The Children’s Book of Virtues. A king and his hawk go hunting all day long, and as the king is galloping home on horseback, he realizes how thirsty he is. Thankfully, he remembers a special stream nearby that he can drink from, and soon he finds it. It is flowing, but only just. Slowly, he fills his cup. When at last he is ready to raise it to his lips and drink, his hawk swoops down and smacks it out of his hands. He is confused, upset, very thirsty. He picks the cup up and fills it again, the drips trickling out slowly as he aches for water. Finally, it is full. Again, the hawk again swoops down to knock the cup away. The king is incensed. He tries again. The third time, the king can only wait until the cup is filled halfway before raising it to his lips. Yet again, the hawk knocks it down, and this time his cup goes flying up above the spring, out of reach. Fuming and parched, the king huntsman raises his sword and slashes his hawk, felling it to the ground. Now, at last, I shall drink, the king says. He clambers up the rocks to retrieve the cup, but to his sick surprise, he finds a highly poisonous snake dead in the water, tainting what he had almost drank. In a rush of horror, he sees that his hawk had saved his life three times, and he had thanked it by killing it. The king is never the same.

telekinesis

We tried every permutation of not-apart. We drew up contracts, made promises, told ourselves things would change when I moved away. How is it possible you’ve caused me all this heartache and you’re not even an ex, she texted me.

Let’s be exes then, I wrote back. Maybe if we could live inside that little word, the kind of word people understand, it might hold more of our hurt. I said, Let’s be girlfriends, just for a minute. But then we’ll say goodbye. This isn’t good for us. 

Deal, she said. Hi girlfriend. She texted me a picture of her hand, to hold. I allowed myself to imagine her face, to love her without being afraid, to live for a moment inside this little parenthetical of time when she was mine and I was hers.

Maybe we were never meant to survive. I drove to a park and she sent me a link to a song to play. When I got there, I sent her pictures, showed her where we were walking together, told her where her hands were: holding mine, around my waist, in my hair, pulling me towards her. She DJed again on the drive home, a sadder song. The air tightened.

my baby 

When my baby is bad in the company of others, I say to her, we’re having puppy tacos for dinner! I poke at her muscled butt. Who wants this rump roast? She play-bites gently at my hands. It feels important to express my willingness to eat the thing I love most.

But when we are alone again, I bury my nose into her ears, so tightly I can feel the suction on my breath. I want this smell to attach itself to the whole surface area of my lungs, to concentrate inside of me, to grow denser, to multiply by a thousand.

salvation

I’ll quarantine with you, she’d said. We’ll be Cuitlacuaches—a portmanteau of the street we were on and my favorite animal. She took the bus to me, putting the seat back all the way down to lie flat because buses made her sick. When she arrived, I held onto her like the edge of a cliff, like the top of a waterfall.

I tried to remember if she’d always been that small compared to me. If she’d always kissed me like that, pausing on my mouth, still, like kids making their Barbies kiss.

I thought back to when I’d learned about the vestibular system, the professor holding his arms up, bent into a big circle, telling us to imagine water running through the tubes of his arms, describing what it does in your body when you spin and spin and spin and suddenly stop. The water keeps rushing.

the Hulk

I cannot figure out which are the words I want to scream. They scramble in my throat, choke themselves upon their own spindly limbs.

My Hulk forgot his lunch at home. My Hulk shut himself off from everything alive in the world and then ordered take-out. My Hulk is alone watching a nature documentary by a girl he used to love. My Hulk is a dove who flies into windows.

her

I am without her now. We do not speak. The place she has left me is dry and frightening.

1. I’ve cut up every plastic 6-ring. Not just the big circles but the little ones too; I cut open everything that could possibly be considered enclosed. I consider every theoretical asphyxiated bird neck, looking at my trash like a weapon that might be neutralized.
2. I cannot pause in the center lane of traffic. The sounds. The whoosh. The shudder of the frame of the car against all that is outside.
3. I’ve learned the names of the cacti. Saguaro. Ocotillo. Fish hook. Cholla. Beehive.
4. The stoplights are covered in burlap sacks and tied. They look like prisoners, things taken hostage. They loom from up in the sky. You can still see the changing colors from inside, but only just.
5. There is wasteland, and there are ghosts. Some cacti are propped up by three long sticks in a tripod.
6. I try to forget what she knows about me, what she held in her hands the way she did the baby orphan mouse she rescued from the front yard, feeding it milk with an eyedropper.
7. I want to believe that the energy in these droplets is helping. Someone watched these flowers as they grew, pulled out their essence, and mailed it to me in a bottle.

my baby

Today it rained, a downpour. My baby and I go out for a walk and the rain has transformed the park into a giant lake. I unclick the leash. She sprints through the lake-puddle, electrified with life, droplets mixed with grass cuttings dancing off her. I pause by the side of the expanse, and then I take off my shoes. We chase each other through the water, I throw sticks and debris and she leaps after them. I am soaked past my knees, the both of us covered in grass clippings. We run to the deep end of the puddle-lake. I throw the stick again, far, and then I sit down and put my legs in front of me. The water is high enough to cover my thighs. She returns with the stick. I throw it again and lie back, vertebra by vertebra, until I’m resting in the water, until it hits my shoulders, my hair, my forehead. I bring my hand to my face and I pinch my nose, shut my eyes, and sink.

her

She is water in a jar on a shelf in my house and I only let myself love it wordlessly.

I keep praying. Filling glassware with fresh water and rice. Counting dolphins. Putting heavy things in my hands and pulling my arms close to me again, so that one day I might know what is for holding and what is for letting go.

Issue 50 • Fall 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry