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Originally published in print by Wasafiri (Issue 124) on December 2025.
Maria works as a line-cook at a pizzeria, but she calls
it a restaurant, calls herself a chef. Every Monday
morning she braids her ponytail high, rolling it
into itself like a fruit loop, gathers a scoop of toxic
yellow jelly from her miniature sink to lather her
head, pushing back strand after strand after
strand. The bathroom
echoes the sound of moisture, compact
in a plastic tub, the cartoon face
of a punk rocker plastered on the front. Maria wears
a white apron, doesn’t mind the stains. The decoration of
a thick grey-brown line marks her torso, from the times
her short stature bent over the toppings line to collect
pepperoni. Maria makes a tower
of Pisa, a tower of pitsa she says, smiling through her gap
— a missing tooth from her days without insurance,
these days — and places
the pepperoni in a circle on the dough with the speed and precision
of an Olympian. Flipping them off her palms by the flick
of a thumb like a blackjack dealer. Maria takes her lunch
in the backroom, sits on top of the sauce boxes and eats
by the bins or in her blue Honda, when her son isn’t using it.
After a while, she walks by the neighbourhood shops collecting
her Avon orders to input at night, before heading back to work
on the line. Maria has a picture of Mexico in her wallet, her home
-town, with a smile on her face and her father holding
her up on his shoulders, the wide-open lands behind them dusting
his leather boots. Maria has a cream-coloured cross tied
around her cracked leather purse that she rubs
when her legs and back start to ache after
a long shift and talks about her family in the past tense.
Maria has a son who she worries about, says he’s
friends with the wrong crowd, but gleams at the sight
of him. He brings back her keys with a group of
boys and she wonders where he goes with the curve
of her brow as they drive away, subwoofers booming, rattling
his friend’s barely held together Nissan. I hit him once
with a piñata bat when I was 12 and he was 8.
I felt so bad I walked
home in tears and apologised to her
on shift four years later. Maria lives in
a mobile home, three doors down
from our old home. Maria works with my dad, or worked
with my dad before he was fired for letting illegals
work in the shop. He sat in the living room for weeks
after with his hands in his head, guilty over the injustices
of the law. Maria is now unemployed.
I don’t know where she is.