Making A Fist

We forget that we are all dead men conversing wtih dead men. —Jorge Luis Borges For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. 'How do you know if you are going to die?' I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, 'When you can no longer make a fist.' Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.