Dogs of Summer

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She painfully realizes that Isora is growing up faster, but admits that her own sexual desire is fixated on her friend: “Then I’d look at Isora and think about how I couldn’t touch her the way other girls touched and hugged, but maybe I could touch her in ways dat havnt evn been invntd, stroke the backs of her knees with my hand or run my fingers along the scabs that edged her toenails or rub the rolls of flesh that stuck out over her panties.

She said chos, Shit, I shouldna trimmed them so short, and then stepped carefully on the tarmac so that she wouldn’t get stabbed by the gravel, so that she wouldn’t cut herself on shards of the drunks’ smashed bottles.Dad grabbed an old mop handle and dressed it in Grandpa’s old clothes: a blue-and-white striped shirt that was too tight on him and had a large breast pocket – I remember how his belly used to jut out, big and round like a boulder – and a pair of black pleated trousers, also his. As follows, we lose the locational specificity of “panza de burro,” the suffocating weight of the weather, but perhaps gain an additional sense of wildness and heat.

Abreu does not shy away from the violent and frightening aspects of sexual awakening; rather, she foregrounds them with an intensity that is sometimes painful.

Yet the narrator is aware of the casual homophobia underpinning her community, which she and Isora participate in by nicknaming the neighbor’s effeminate son Juanito “Juanita Banana”; queer sexuality is therefore intertwined with the threat of violence. Her moles sucked up all the sunscream and I had to squeeze more out of the yellow bottle of SPF 30 into my right hand and then rub sunscream on her thighs again. Juanita hated studying, and his dad was always saying that if he didn’t study he’d send him to pick tomatoes in the fields, and sometimes I suspected that it was more than just a threat and that his dad really did want him to start picking tomatoes as a lilboy.