Flat on my back I ached with sleep and spit the words up into the air above my face, "This can’t be good for me."

My body didn’t want anymore. Trying to sleep was as hard as forcing food down. The simple act of laying on my stomach did have me fading in and out, between twisting up Alana’s blanket and clawing the mattress as if climbing on my belly toward dreamland. On the fade-ins, I’d had so much sleep that I was dumb stoned and I wondered why it was so dark in her room. Then realized it was night again; almost 24-hours I’d been in Alana’s bed.

I assumed it must be some nighttime animal, a gecko or some bird, making that sobbing sound out the window, though it sounded contained, reverberating the tin walls of some house out there in the jungle. Sleep melted away while laying there listening to the pitiful call, and I remembered that I was ordered to wait there for Alana to fix things, to come back with Ilka’s smile. But I remembered that I’d waited long enough. I had every right to get up.

As I readied to rise, the sobbing grew pronounced, almost human. When it stopped, invisible pulleys yanked my torso up vertical and swung my dead legs over the green metal bed-frame where I had slammed Alana’s head like an idiot. The memory sobered me and I stood upright. But in three seconds I was down again on the bed, sitting, Alana’s thin mattress beckoning my shoulderblades. I’d never been so beaten up by sleep. If I had slept anymore, I’m sure I would have died.

Finally I stood and before I could sit again, I took one long lumber, and I was across the room, holding onto a doorknob, though I remembered there had been no doorknob in that same door last night. Then I remembered the swans outside and so I held the mystery knob for a long time before twisting it and peaking out.

The whole yard was still there. The ladder against the tree. The overturned boat. The dead car laying on its back at the top of the precipice. But no swans, so I walked out. Shutting the door behind me I noticed no doorknob on the outside of the door. Only the inside.

A few steps into the yard, the quick, high-pitched moan came again from the biggest house, Ilka’s house, and I assumed negotiations weren’t going good. Ilka was still mad. Maybe Alana hadn’t made all the money back. Maybe I could not be forgiven. Regardless, Alana was in there and so I didn’t hesitate to tap on Ilka’s front door, and when no one answered, I didn’t hesitate to push it in.

Inside there was Alana’s back, and the back of her black hair, none of which turned at the sound of me through the door. Beyond her back and hair was a small, round, homemade table, bare but for a small box of corn starch with a straw in it, aimed in Alana’s direction. Then two glasses of ice. And on the opposite side of the big circle, taking up the entire background of the scene, was Ilka, facing me like a mountain range. She lacked such form that I couldn’t tell if she stood or sat. She was just a giant clay waiting to be placed on the round table in front of it, and spun down into the figure of a human woman.

Ilka squeezed a little yellow box of corn starch in the grip of her baby-fat fingers. A thin straw connected the box to her smiling lips. Of all the rare birds I thought I’d never see; Ilka’s fat smile.

At first I knew she must be smiling at a particularly tasty mouthful, but she kept the smile long enough to have me believing it was surely - as Alana had promised - for me. She kept the smile as she picked up one of the glasses of ice, and it was still on when her dumptruck mouth opened to receive the ice, which she crunched like bones while setting the glass back down. As the ice went away down into her, her smile locked flat and still again, around the straw, and I didn’t like it. It stretched in pain to keep up with her wide face. And she was forcing me to take it; it wasn’t for me, or at me, it was on me. It made me cold and, I realized, it kept me silent.

As I was about to rebel against the smile, Ilka looked down at her daughter and said something in Spanish, her tongue sounding fat in her mouth, squashing her voice as it came out. I couldn’t understand her. She nodded to the other box of cornstarch on the table, and Alana let out that sharp moan and her hand went out to the little yellow box.

"Alana, don’t eat that stuff!" I laughed over her shoulder, picturing Alana getting addicted to that shit and ballooning up. Alana turned around to me and I heard Ilka crunching bones again in the background as I watched her daughter cry.

"No, no, no!" were my first three words and, "Baby, what?" were my next, and instinct compelled me to bend and hold her but when I did she pushed me off, far enough away, to make room for her to cock her arm back and smack me in the temple with the inside of a fist.

"Hey, don’t! What’s the matter?" I said, my voice intolerable with whine, but I didn’t know how to react, being hit by a girl. She was up yelling into me in Spanish and pushing me back and I flinched at all the right times, but when she went to hit me again I grabbed her wrists. In them I felt all her real, thin youth. She screamed in my face but what raced my heart was thinking that, if I hit her back I could go away for child abuse. What am I doing to this kid? It all scared me and I would have started to cry if I hadn’t caught Ilka’s lips, smiling like two wide fingers, side-by-side under her fat nose.

"Alana, what’s the matter?" I asked, holding her wrists like squirming fish. I needed to let go before she broke off in my hands. Her face was lit with tears and anger. And when I did let go, she brought all 98 pounds of her behind one more knuckled slap which missed my face but hit my shoulder and I yelled, louder than I expected to, "Don’t hit me!" It forced her back and she wilted onto the floor, her black hair wet with tears and painted over her face, which rested between her elbows, and her elbows on the seat of her chair. All of it covered with her hair.

"Don’t tell me what to do." She said in broken pieces from under the mess. She cried hard but I held my anger at her for hitting me. Until I thought of the hot chocolate, how she’d let it pour over her, without a sound. It then scared me to imagine how much hurt it would take to break her down, and I found myself on my knees by her with a gentle hand in her hair, searching for an ear or an eye saying, "Alana, what happened? What’s wrong? I love you…tell me…"

"You kill Romeo." She barely said; her whisper was wet and it brought some tears from me, but I didn’t know what she meant, and when I asked, "Who is Romeo?" without raising her face, she swung at me again, the hard tops of her fingernails cracked my temple.

I screamed into her hair, louder than I have since I was a child, "QUIT FUCKING HITTING ME ALANA! FUCKING SERIOUS!!!" My voice was high and lacked control and its volume reminded me that Ilka was still in the room, but when I looked up the skinslide of her gut and tits, up to her head, her smile was still big, and then I remembered who Romeo was.

I stood up again I asked down to her, "You mean one of the swans, Alana?"

She nodded affirmative. I think.

"What happened?" I asked, tensing, ready to deflect.

"You brea-eak he ne-e-eck." She said, the sound of her belying a real broken heart so that I didn’t care if she hit me again, I just wanted to help, I cried with her and some part of me yelled NO, but my body went down again to her, defending myself into her hair, in a place where I thought the ear might be.

I could barely get it out my own wet mouth but I begged, "No, no, no, they were fine when I came in last night. I didn’t hurt them, serious…"

Her head sprang up and I flinched back and faintly yelled, "don’t".

I couldn’t see her face through her hair when she said, "You say you hit him! You told me! And mami saw you too!"

With that she blubbered onto the floor in a heap. I couldn’t see her cry, and I followed, crying along. I would have followed her until she fell apart. It scared me. I raised my eyes to Ilka again and, refracted through the water, she looked fatter than the she had a minute ago. She was still sucking corn starch and though her daughter was loud with tears, Ilka smiled around the straw, and I knew she’d killed the swan last night.

I stopped crying and turned back to Alana and said, "Alana! Look at her smile!" pointing at Ilka. But by the time Alana’s head made it up, and her eyes reached her mother, Ilka was chewing ice and it was gone.

My knees hurt when I stood up, like I’d been at church all day. I’d had enough now. I commanded, "Come outside and talk with me, Alana." And then stretched my hand to her and trying to watch Ilka too, because I am scared of her now and I hate her.

Alana’s head came up, then her shoulders and she would have kept on her trajectory to the floor if the back of her head hadn’t slammed a metal wall, catching her and shaking the house. Her face tightened with the pain and there were more tears but she was silent. I felt a relief that she had kept the scream inside. With an eye on Ilka, I stuck out my hand again and repeated, "C’mon, Alana, let’s go outside and talk."

She answered in separate notes, "No-o-o-o-o," that dwindled in renewed tears of pain.

Not knowing what else to do, I walked outside anyway, by myself. It was quiet in the yard, no symphony of crickets or birds or geckos. I looked around for a new grave, but didn’t see one. I assumed Ilka ate Romeo’s huge body, it would have been a feast.

Before I was able to wonder about Juliet I spotted her at the base of a tree, underneath the ladder to nothing. She was in a ball, her neck folded under her head, her chin on her chest, and her feet somewhere under her body like big, soft spare-tire. But she was half her size. I could have mistaken her for a duck again.