raid by aureleo sans
Managing editor and fiction editor Esperanza Vargas Macias on today’s bonus story: I love the way aureleo sans brings together all the characters from my favorite legends like a badass superhero team poised to defeat a very real enemy. More than anything, I love the hope this gave me that one day we will #AbolishICE.
raid
Before sunrise, the door contemplated splintering as the bodies of the ICE agents attempted to penetrate Resurrection House.
“It’s the police,” they lied. “Open up,” they ordered.
“We have a warrant,” they lied again. “We have a battering ram,” they announced, but didn’t lie.
The agents launched a metronome of conga beats. Our bones registered the bass.
They yelled that they were looking for Jose Hernandez, Mario Perez, Juan Gonzales, the most generic of names. These men lived at this address, they said. But this was a boarding home for recovering female addicts and magical beings. Had been for years.
Truth was none of us had documents. To American Dream is to American Night Terror. Like Christmas or the End of Days, we knew this day would come.
“I could feed the cute agents shrimp and fart on them and feast on their blood,” La Tunda offered. “And then kill the rest.”
The original jungle vamp queen had escaped La Violencia, the gold mines, and the death squads just to confront another violence here. Like we all had. La Tunda screwed a molinillo into her hip socket, and the house began preparing for war.
La Llorona capsized her collection of Cabbage Patch Kids in the bathtub overflowing once again. The Donkey Lady, whose power rested in her disfigurement, practiced throwing looks that cracked mirrors and history. La Lechuza blinked huge owl eyes and screeched, her wings slapping the air, and a snowstorm inside the house swelled. Like usual, La Lechuza triggered La Bola de Fuego and all six feet of her accidentally ignited, incinerating the curtains.
Things were spiraling now.
“Let me cast a spell,” Rosario, the house cyclops and bruja, exclaimed. She fumigated the air with cockroach aerosol, and everyone started coughing as she started singing, “La Cucaracha.” She would later say she had been saving Raid for the raid.
Before our eyes, ICE thawed, boiled, and melted into sewer water. The AK-47s and AR-15s dotted the lawn.
“It’s like a constellation of arms,” La Tunda hissed. “I wish they were their real arms.”
We donated the guns to the neighborhood watch. Switched out the plates on the unmarked Black SUVs and drove them down to Mexico for dismantling. Smiled at the border agents. Transformed the two white passenger vans into ice cream trucks. Sold Choco Tacos and played “Que Calor” forever.
aureleo sans is a writer based in San Antonio, Texas, and the child of a formerly undocumented immigrant. He is an alumnus of VONA and the 2021 Tin House Summer Workshop and a reader at jmww. His work is forthcoming in the Boston Review, the 2022 Roots. Wounds. Words. Anthology, The Offing, Shenandoah, and The Commuter. You can find him at www.aureleos.com or on Twitter at @aureleos.
