Drown

This story is told in a series of numbered vignettes.

1.

Yunior tells us that he lived without a father for the first nine years of his life. His father was in the United States working. Therefore, the only way he knew him was through the photographs that his mother kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Because the zinc roof of his childhood home leaked, almost all of the possessions of his family were water-stained.

During this time in his life, when Yunior thought of his father, he would think of a particular photograph of him, which was taken ten days before the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. When the photograph was taken, Yunior was not yet alive, his mother (referred to as “Mami”) was pregnant with a child she would later miscarry, and Yunior’s grandfather could still see well enough to hold a job. The photograph has scalloped edges and is sepia-toned. His mother had written several things on the back of it: the date, his name, the street name. His father was dressed in “his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips.