LISETTE GARCIA's work can be found at Miami Stories, storySouth, and Outsider Ink. Her flash fiction story "Blind Spot" was published in the June 2002 edition of insolent rudder.

                                                            havana club


Brown liquor, warm, goes down rocky like crushed glass, yes, crumbs from a broken beer bottle, like those nestled along the edges of the New Jersey turnpike. Papi’s Chrysler--coming home tonight again too late--makes his own gutter sparkle for a second, but hardly will a moment of high-beamed shine convert roadside trash into diamonds or gold. That, I promise you.

"It wasn’t bad like this before, y’know," Papi says, excusing the taste of petrol contorting my face--at this point, a tradition. As always, I chase the first/toast sip of Havana Club with a heartier swallow, hoping to deaden the sting. It invariably swells my tongue something awful.
"Some bite," I spit out at last. I’m over the worst of it, he says from habit, and re-pours until the bottle is exhausted.

You’d think by this time I’d have grown accustomed to the nostalgia-inducing elixir: formerly "the pride of our Cuban heritage," today co-opted by revolutionaries who once pledged to sweep Cuba clean of bourgeois debaucheries such as this. Doctor cousins bring it each time they pretend not to return; their biannual mercy trips "only serve to fill Castro’s coffers," bark the radio talk show hosts. But who could be dull enough to nurse half-century-old betrayals? Papi, for one. Although, from the pain-etched faces of subsequent refugees, I’d judge Ramiro "Ram" Arce not a strong contender for the title of Grudgemeister.

Another "Before. . ." speech starts. I’m tempted to head home. However, this is my father, who "trod every snow-covered hill and valley in New England bent on selling every Eskimo a Popsicle and providing you the finest education American money can buy." If I could freely listen to far more taxing dissertations at Stanford on Groucho’s dimwitted predecessor, I can surely pretend to act interested in this man, who shares my regularly contorted face and name.

I keep drinking the nasty stuff. It seems the more Havana Club I let flood my teeth and gums, the less of Papi’s moaning, then sobbing, enters my rum-flushed ears. Thankfully, you don’t need a degree in Engels’ flawed rhetoric to spout back Papi’s litany verbatim: Before the revolution, Before Communism, Before Castro, Before the fall. No matter how many times you’ve lip-read the message, you’re still wondering/hoping even a smidgen of it could be true: No snakes or scorpions? Hummingbirds the size of a human thumbnail? Turtles as big as ovens? Stingerless bees harvesting non-toxic pain killers year-round? Then, your brain tires of conjuring a paradise that he promises, and scientists independently confirm, once truly existed, but is forever lost, and your mind goes numb as well.


After these reunions, sleep is rare, despite that fact that I’m entirely spent. He offers me linden tea, which steadies my nerves a little, but fails to ever knock me out completely. Instead, I watch David Letterman, then a movie, then the national anthem and rest his nodding head on my shoulder so it won’t fall and smack the dining room table.

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© 2002 Lisette García