Preludes by Mary Luna

The Writer 

She’s writing a story about her grandmother or maybe the color yellow. Why does she keep moving towards scenes from her childhood? She writes at her small desk in an attic that was never meant to be a bedroom. She thinks of childhood; she thinks about Lorca. Soon the poet walks in, then the bartender. The poet recites lines that are better than hers will ever be. He lays on her bed and watches her write. The bartender looks over her shoulder. She watches herself in the mirror. She sucks in her stomach. Her father calls from jail. Again and again. There are too many people in this room. She’s in the garden again; the marigolds; the green salamander running towards a turquoise fountain. She writes a line, I want to write the colors of my childhood. Good line, the poet says. Let’s go out for a walk, he says. She looks at the line again. 

The Story

I want to write the colors of my childhood. My grandfather’s brown desk near the entryway. His sighs. His brown trousers. In the same entryway, the brown frame with a picture of my grandmother. You have the same breasts as my mother, my mother said one day when I was older. The long mahogany table used only for special family dinners; the table where I tried my first alcohol–the rum in the ponche my grandfather made. My mother likes to tell a story of drinking whiskey with her father on that same desk before going to work.

Not the blue of melancholia nor the ocean or the sky. I want to write about an ugly blue tarp used as an outdoor ceiling to my friend’s house. I don’t know how I met the girl or her family or why my mother left me there for a week. Under the tarp I was at the whims of a family barely able to keep themselves alive. I walked into the small room like the bottom of a dark blue well (what’s another word for blue? Indigo? Indigo well? Mazarine? Blavus) A man lays down to pull his penis out and asks me to touch it–not blue but pink. Now if I think back on it, my mother’s melancholia. At seven, I see the sea in Puerto Vallarta. We release sea turtles. The sand crabs die in my blue bucket. Watching the ocean made me learn about death. My mother drowned, no, she almost drowned. And running, and the blue tarp and the blue plastic chair and maybe, for that moment, the sky, cerulean. Then the red, red walls.

“Look at that spider,” the poet says. We stop beside a lamp post and watch a spider weave its giant web. (There must be a better word than giant. Maybe cabling. What would the poet say?) His cigarette smoke reaches the spider’s web. I imagine its small mouth opening and inhaling, the smoke rushing to its head, suppressing its appetite. The smog of the cigarette, the web, the light from the moon–there’s an image there. Where is the plot? the poet asks. He touches my red scarf. This is nice. Can I have this?  

Back to the red walls. The stucco walls of Mexico. The vermillion walls are what I called them in a story. The spinning red trompo. I chose red silk for the maypole dance. The shrine in the middle of a cactus field, made of pink and red roses (made out of roses the colors of blush), stood tall and unwavering upon the hills, like a giant mojiganga of the Virgin Guadalupe. Garambullo ice cream is sold there, made from the dark berry picked directly from the garden. Are all your stories set in Mexico, the poet asks. 

The Spider

The spider looked down at the man and woman looking up at it. The man’s smoke reached the spider’s web. The spider allowed herself to be filled with smoke but it did nothing but cloud her eight eyes. Her smoking days were over. She looked over to her dozen eggs and wondered how many of them would hatch. Soon they will run away and make their own webs. Soon, she’ll be alone again with only parroting writers to write about her. The corpse of her lover is on this web somewhere. He was older; he died of old age. She should find a new lover. 

People Leave

When we come back, the bartender is still in my room on the phone with her mother. Soon she’ll leave to see her lover. The one that works with trees. I’m going to his apartment and we’re having sex on his couch, she says. The poet leaves to smoke a cigarette in his room. He thinks no one can smell it or hear his muffled coughs through our thin walls. He calls his wife. Someday, I’ll be a father, he says after the phone call. My mother calls to tell me our dog is dying. I ask the poet and the bartender if they want a drink before they leave. Not tonight, they say. Not with you, they mean. There are other places to be. I sit down again. What does the first line even mean? It’s no story at all. There’s no truth in it. The trompo keeps spinning on my desk. 

Mary Luna is a writer and educator living in western Massachusetts. She is completing her MFA in prose at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

5 December 2025