The Packing

They packed me the night before the crossing. They do it late on purpose, I figured out later, with the part of my mind that never stops working the angles even when the angles do not matter anymore. You load the mule close to the line so the product does not have time to come loose, get lost, get expelled in transit. Fresh cargo crosses cleaner. So they waited until the last staging point, until I was hours from the border, and then they made my body into a place to keep their merchandise.

I am not going to tell you the how. You know by now there are doors I keep shut, and this is one, not to spare you, to spare me. The how is not the thing anyway. The thing is what it meant, and what it meant was the last step of a process that started at a kitchen table when I was ten. First my body was the thing men wanted. Then it was the thing they bought and sold. Then in Hermosillo it got promoted to the thing they used to hold other things. And here, the night before the line, they finished the promotion. They put something inside me that was not mine and not me and worth more than me, and they sealed it in, and they sent me north carrying it, and there is a joke in there so black I can only just stand to say it. My whole life, the one thing my body had never gotten to do, the normal thing, the thing it was supposedly built for, was carry a life. It never got to. The only thing it ever carried, the only thing I was ever pregnant with, was all the poison they could fit inside me and a little electronic chip so they could find their product if their product wandered off.

That was me, crossing. A girl-shaped container with a tracker in it, in case the container had ideas. They were not even tracking me. Let that one land. The chip was not for the girl. The chip was for the merchandise. If I had run, they would not have come looking for Isabella. They would have come looking for what Isabella was holding. I had spent the whole road learning, stage by stage, that I was cargo, and on the last night they made it so literal that even I could not flinch it away. I was the box and the thing in the box, and only one of the two had a homing signal on it, and it was not the one with a soul.

I carried it the way I carried everything by then. Flat. Filed. I did not weep over it, did not rage, just walked to the truck with their poison inside me and their chip inside their poison and my face arranged into nothing, because nothing was the only thing left that was mine. The last of the road, the final hours of my life as a living girl, I spent as a smuggling container with legs, and I want you to hold that against what comes next, because what comes next is the waking, and in the dirt my body finally gives something up, finally delivers, and it is not a child. My body’s one and only labor, the only thing I ever bore and pushed out into the world, was waiting for me in the dirt on the other side of dying. You will see. The road made me a suitcase. The waking is where the suitcase opens.