Clarissa Guzman's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Her mother spoke for a long time. Clarissa listened at the kitchen table. Men had come to their town. Her mother did not feel safe. She packed one bag in the dark and carried Clarissa onto a plane. She left her own mother behind. She left everything. That was why she never told the story. Clarissa nodded and said thank you. Then she climbed the stairs to write it down. She sat at her desk. The cursor blinked. Her hands stayed in her lap. Every word her mother said sat heavy in her chest. She could not pick one to type. She pulled her purple unicorn close and tried to talk through the scene out loud. Nothing came. She just stared at the gray window until her eyes stung. She texted Nia and Liz. "I can't make it move. It's too much." They came within the hour. Nia rolled through the front door of the Bay Area home on her skates, pink hoodie dusted with glitter. Liz came right behind her, gym bag still on her shoulder, no filler, straight to the point. Liz was the friend who never rested, who trained through pain, who docked judges got under her skin. She dropped the bag and looked at Clarissa's face. "You froze," Liz said. "I know that look." "My mom told me the whole thing," Clarissa said. "It's heavier than I thought. She left because she wasn't safe. I can't sit with it and write at the same time. My desk feels wrong." Nia knelt by the bed and pulled a doll off the shelf. Blonde hair, purple eyes, little orange dress and leg warmers. "Okay so," she said. "You don't write this one at a desk. A desk is for homework. This is your mom's actual life." Liz nodded. "Change the room. You can't think in a spot that's stuck." They moved her. Nia spread a blanket on the floor by the window. Liz carried down tea from the kitchen. Clarissa sat cross legged with the unicorn in her lap and the doll beside her. Nia sat on one side. Liz sat on the other, finally still for once. "Just tell us what she said," Nia said. "Like a story. Out loud. We'll shut up." Clarissa started talking. One bag. A dark room. A plane. A grandmother left at a gate. Her voice shook, but the words came. Liz pulled Clarissa's laptop onto the floor and started typing what she heard. Nia caught the parts Liz missed. An hour later Clarissa read the page back. It was real. It sounded like her mother. It sounded like her. "That's the opening," Liz said. "That's it." Clarissa saved the file. The scene that froze her was now the first page of her novel. She had her beginning. But her mother's story ended at a gate, with a grandmother she had never met and a town she still knew nothing about.