Angélica Martinez
The Hailstorm
The hailstorm came on suddenly, do you remember? We were parked in our old Malibu listening to 101.5 back when the radio still worked. Sade’s “By Your Side” was playing, you couldn’t pronounce the lyrics yet and neither could I but her voice reminded me of my grandmother’s, a raspy softness, so I asked you to let it play before we got down. That was when we heard it: first a pitter-patter then a swell of rocky ice hitting the roof of our car, causing the broken ceiling light’s wires to swing gently from the impact. There was no light attached when you bought the car for five hundred dollars the week we got here and we never did fix it did we? Along with the hail came a waft of cold air from the backseat hole in the floor and you said, come, come cuddle here and I sat on your lap and lay on your warm chest until the hail subsided. Where we came from it only ever rained when the sun was at its brightest, a phenomenon my grandmother said was the Holy Virgin crying. Was she angry with us, I asked you as you held me, was the Virgin angry that we left Maracaibo and that is why the rocks are falling on us from the sky? No, you said, this is a sign. Though you had not given your life to Jesus then I suppose you had always been prone to superstition. It’s a sign that anything can happen, you told me, and later when your first husband asked you to move in with him you remembered this night of the hailstorm, you remembered thinking it made you want to take a chance on something, or perhaps it was me who remembered it for you. When it was over there had been no sign of the storm and even the cold had subsided. We went inside our efficiency, the one that stood in the shadow of the big house, for we did not yet deserve to have a house of our own quite yet. The toilet would overflow there if you flushed while it was raining, do you remember? The first time you found that out it made you cry and I did not yet need to comfort you so I simply watched you and soon you stopped and said, come on, the bed is a raft and we are in open water. Come, let’s be safe from the winds that want to capsize us and let’s lie here together tightly, soon the rain will stop and the toilets will not be broken and the house you see in the distance, the house that will never be ours, will be submerged but we will be safe in our raft. I don’t know whether you continued to cry. I fell asleep and in the morning all the water on our floor was gone.
Angélica Martinez is a Venezuelan-American writer, editor, and educator based in New York City. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and was a 2023 VONA/Voices fellow.