My father wears his cowboy hat as we lug crab nets along the Chesapeake. Embarrassed, my older sister disappears, a tiny dot on the horizon. But I like my father’s cowboy boots and silver belt buckle in the shape of Texas. We sit on the edge of the pier and my father tells me stories of home. Of cattle ranches and land stretched flat as boards, so dry that footsteps stir dust into tornadoes. And of tortillas. Not the kind around here. Real ones. Round and bubbled, flipped with fingertips on an iron skillet. This is Texas, he tells me.
Cristina Flores currently teaches at The Muse Writing Center in Norfolk, Virginia, where she resides with six chickens, two dogs, and one spouse.