Jesse Sisler

Jesse Sisler is a high school special education teacher who lives in Evanston, Illinois. He is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied History.

About the piece:

Maria Elena is a short story inspired by the crisis in Venezuela, specifically about how decisions made by people in power affect individuals.

Maria Elena sat up on her cot and wrapped a now-beige-formerly-white linen bed sheet around her shoulders. The fraying edges felt softer than the center, and they tickled her collarbone. She had an itch on her thigh but she was too lost in thought - about the conflict, the children, the men gone to who knew where, maybe Colombia, maybe Brazil - to work up the will to scratch it. She ran her tongue over her chapped lips, exhaled through her nose, and looked out

the window. 

She scanned her home, taking in the round wooden coffee table in the center of the kitchen-dining room, the broken refrigerator which she now used as a closet, the radio that provided daily updates from state and opposition-run newscasts. She saw the two mattresses on the floor where her cousin and her cousin’s toddlers slept.

The bedsheet’s smell started to bother her, so she swung her bare feet over the edge of the cot and stretched, her toes extending outward and putting pressure on the dusty floor, flexing her shoulders and neck, enjoying the tender sensation her own body could create. It reminded her of when her grandma used to scratch her back after braiding her hair. She remembered her sister’s elbows grazing her hip in the night when they shared the mattress that her cousin now used.

Her grandma died during the Chavez years when they could not sustain their crop and the oil money would not trickle past the colectivos, and the tourists in the capital no longer found it chic to buy indigenous art and started springing for the thousand-dollar paintings in the galleries run by Brazilians and Argentinians.

Her sister studied in Caracas and met a Chinese-American CEO. They moved to London and donated campaign money to that donkey, Maduro, in 2018. But Maria stayed around. Her cousins came into the picture a year or so after her sister moved out, and things stayed as they had the last twenty-ish years. About once a month an army thug would stay a few nights, never speaking except to insult the indigenous filth whose rough he shared and to make calls using a flip-phone to his Colombian clients. This was permitted by the community’s de-facto mayor, who in exchange for permitting the chavista nonsense to continue was allowed to keep his farm from burning down and to pocket the equivalent of a few dollars a month from whatever contraband sale was going down.

The last time she saw the army thug, whose name was Juan, was about a month ago. He was delivering small arms and several bricks of cocaine to a Colombian lackey. He spat on the floor on the way out, yanked the power cord from the refrigerator, and complained to the mayor that if he had to deal with such slime again he would spray a barrage of bullets into every home in the jungle between here and the border. So the chain of bureaucracy had conspired to isolate one of its habitantes originarios.

No longer a recipient of the chavista food packages, she had to ration dramatically. She had lost seventeen pounds over the last eight months. Her breakfast that morning was a third of a bowl of dried rice and a sip of old milk. The milk made her gag but she kept her rice down.

Now she sits on her bed and thinks. The only thing she could even call a memory (because everything else takes place as one continuous event; this is the only event that actually stands alone) is jogged by the sound of birds fluttering and the longed-for smell of arepas that cannot possibly be real, like the caress of a would-be love in a dream. (Though her insomnia prevents Maria from dreaming.)

But time does not allow us to examine this memory, though it certainly involves her making dolls with her mother while her grandma stuffs the arepas with cheese and beans and goat. She is interrupted by the voice-cracked adolescent yelps of who turn out to be chavistas as they throw canisters of tear gas at the opposition who apparently have been hiding in the jungle and return the volley with rocks and sticks. Some of the accents would sound Cuban to Maria if she had ever met a Cuban.

And just as quickly as the milk-induced gag-reflex came and went, so too do Maria’s thought and breath. Blood splashes on the now-red-then-beige-originally-white linen, and the buzz in Maria’s ears as she fades makes her think of fireflies tickling her lobes while her sister kicks a soccer ball and she sleeps in her mother’s lap. And perhaps this is all that has been missing: not food packages, not kickbacks, not even a fraction of a percentage of the petróleo, but a mother who was smuggled into Colombia during the Escobar years by a Bolivar wannabe carrying a scythe, a mother who never left Maria’s conscious but…

And then the shouts of the chavistas drifted towards the jungle canopy, silencing the birds