daniel barrios

When we moved to North Avenue, we were the only Dominican family on the block. I was sixteen, old enough to take note of the bizarre customs. People had mailboxes that could only open with a key. The mailboxes in the projects had looked like grey P.O. boxes in a mailroom except some were busted open and broken into. This was an upgrade, I reminded myself. Hand-painted sunflowers were proof that we’d moved up.

One time, I saw a woman painting her mailbox. Her face was red and her yellow hair was frizzing and she was sweating but the labor made her skin glow. She wore a sunhat that looked like a sombrero. Whenever she dipped her brush in the bucket, she wiped the excess paint off the brush on the bucket’s edge. She walked with the doused brush from her driveway to the mailbox, careful not to drip. I thought, why can’t she just lay some newspaper on the grass? Did she enjoy painting that much?

The woman got the mailbox as white as my baby sister’s milk bottle. Then I watched her add four large sunflowers. I thought, There’s no way we’re doing that to our mailbox. She was stroking golden hues into the black circles. The wrinkles on her pale face, the way her eyelids were never all the way open, the shakiness in her wrist when she painted—she looked tired. It was getting painful to watch and I was thankful that I wasn’t a viejo.

In the end the woman’s mailbox was beautiful. An extension of the grass on her lawn, and the flowers in her garden. At the very least, she cared. The longer I watched, the more I started to wonder about the people who lived on this street. They seemed so different from what I was used to—careful, particular, almost obsessive about little things. It was like they had built a life so neat, so perfect, that the smallest imperfection might tear it all apart. I couldn’t imagine putting so much effort into something as insignificant as a mailbox. Back where I came from, we didn’t have the time or energy for that. We had to get by, survive, and keep moving. There was a certain comfort in that, even if it meant not having perfectly painted sunflowers.

The front yards varied. Most had white picket fences, some high-quality wood, others cheap plastic. The other commonality was that most of the yards sported a metal sign, driven into the grass with a little spike. All of these signs sounded a warning regarding the urine and excrement of dogs, but the warnings were differently worded. One yard had a sign that said “Curb Your Dog.” Another yard had a sign on which the words “No Trespooping” ringed the silhouette of a squatting dog. Another yard had a sign with a silhouette of a dog raising its leg, and the caption, “Please Don’t Water Our Plants.” Another yard had a laminated notecard, stuck with packing tape to the trunk of a tree, with a message handwritten in capitals, in the sky blue of an aged ballpoint pen, that read, “To Whom it May Concern, this lawn and tree are in excellent condition on account of the fact that I have maintained them with care. Please be respectful of the time I have invested. In other words, if you permit your dog to crap on my lawn, I will take the problem into my own hands to the fullest extent permitted by the law. Yours sincerely, Brendan E. Conley III.” That was the husband of the woman who’d painted her mailbox. All of my new white neighbors smiled and waved hello when I walked by. I never heard a harsh or unwelcoming word. But there was anger everywhere on signs.

Casa was beige. My stepdad said it was called a ‘duplex’ and I hadn’t heard that word before. Nothing like the buildings we used to live in, the ones made of brick that always felt like they were holding you in a tight grip, never giving you room to breathe. This place felt different, quieter, but still uncomfortable, like you were always waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t tell if it was the beige walls, the yard that seemed too empty, or just the people who didn’t talk to anyone unless they had to.

No one napped in hammocks or did much in front of their homes, everyone kept to themselves on North Avenue. When I told my stepdad we needed a hammock out front, he shook his head. “We can’t make it look ghetto,” he said. I wondered what was so ghetto about a hammock. I’d seen plenty of people in the projects with hammocks strung up between two trees. It wasn’t fancy, just a place to sit and relax. My stepdad said the word like it was a disease, something that would contaminate us if we let it creep into our lives here. I didn’t get it, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me argue. We were supposed to fit in here, not stand out.

Then I told him we needed a dog, because we didn’t have any friends here yet, and it was lonely. I told him how Mami promised she would get us a dog once we moved out of the projects, but never delivered. All of this was true. My stepdad was quiet for a minute, his eyes focused on the TV like he didn’t hear me. Finally, he sighed. “Do some research. Find out where we can get one,” he said, dismissing me with the wave of a hand. I decided to ask Jonny Moreira; he had a pitbull. Jonny was the only kid who had talked to me since we got here, and I wasn’t sure if it was because we were both Hispanic or if it was just because we were both stuck in this beige world together.

The Moreiras were the only other Hispanic family on North Avenue. They were not ghetto. They had black and blue garbage cans with sealed lids. We hadn’t recycled in the projects, and I knew my stepdad would need to buy garbage cans just like theirs. Flies circled our driveway like drones at war. Mami was on my stepdad’s case about the cans, because she hated hunting them down in casa with Windex and a chancla. We threw our cardboard boxes in front of our driveway without breaking them up or binding them together. That did look ghetto. And it got us into trouble.

I’d always wondered what it would be like to live in a house like the Moreiras. Their yard was always perfectly mowed, the grass a thick, lush green like something you’d see in a commercial. Ours was full of patches, brown spots where the sun baked it into submission. Every time I stepped outside, I could feel the dirt on my shoes, the smell of gasoline and old tires from the neighbors’ cars, and the sharp scent of burning wood from someone’s backyard barbecue. But the Moreiras? They didn’t have that smell. Everything about their life seemed so… clean. Even the way Jonny’s dad walked across the street to take out the trash—it was like he knew exactly how to do it. No halfhearted effort, no clutter.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like the Moreiras were living in some other version of reality, one where everything worked out effortlessly, where the pieces of life fit together like they were supposed to. Meanwhile, we were still here, struggling to make our lives make sense. I’d never get the hammock, I knew that now, but maybe a dog would be enough. Maybe if I could just find the right one, the perfect dog, everything would start to feel a little less out of place. I’d have someone to talk to, someone who didn’t care about our trash or the stupid beige duplex we lived in. Someone who’d stay loyal, no matter how many mistakes we made. But even as I thought about it, I wasn’t sure it was enough. What if it didn’t fix anything at all?

One day I caught Jonny walking his dog a few yards away. I called to him and he didn’t hear me but I was sure he was deliberately ignoring me. I called out louder, in a shrill voice that annoyed even me. He turned around but it was obvious he had better things to do with his time, pulling on Albert Hammond, Jr’s red leash. The leash was clipped to a spiked collar. I thought, If I had a dog of my own, I would never clip a leash to his collar. That looked so uncomfortable. My dog would have a body harness and a retractable leash.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Where can I get a dog like that? He’s a beast.”

Jonny came a little closer, and spoke avidly of the dog rescue on Forest Avenue, his eyes wide. All you had to do was go straight down our street and make a left onto Forest. Jonny said they’d just finished renovating the rescue and everything was state of the art. And he kept going on about how helpful the staff was and that if it hadn’t been for them, he would’ve never met Albert Hammond, Jr. He said to make sure we curbed our dog, if we got one. I gave him a friendly wave, knowing all too well his grass would be the first my future dog would violate.

I kept following him and his dog and he eventually invited me inside his home. The structure was like mine. The living room as soon as you walk inside. The staircase leading upstairs. The kitchen in the back of the house. The difference in this house was the furniture. Everything that could be covered in plastic, was. Even the dining table was covered with what looked like seran wrap. Then I saw the metal cage that Jonny led Albert Hammond Jr into. There was a black yoga mat that was supposed to be his bed and enough room in the black cage to stretch his body if he wanted to.

“He doesn’t get sad in the cage all day?” I asked.

“Nunca,” Jonny said. “He’s an alpha. Something you wouldn’t know about.”

I hated Jonny. But I admired his don’t-care attitude, and I kept him around because I thought I could learn a few things from him for the future. Eventually me and Yordan got to going over his house at least once a week. He still didn’t let us play with his nerf guns, but he did let me play Super Smash Bros with him while Yordan watched. Jonny only had two remote controllers for his Nintendo. He never let my brother hold one; he only trusted me for some reason. Yordan stopped going over Jonny’s house altogether because he said it was boring. I still went. I had the idea of owning my own dog in my head, and so I brought up the dog rescue again.

“Jonny, you said the dog place was on Forest?”

“Yeah, you didn’t hear me the first time I said it?”

“I was just making sure, I didn’t want to end up at the wrong place,” I said.

“The only wrong place you’re ending up is off the edge of this platform. Kirby is the worst character you could’ve picked,” Jonny said.

“I’m being foreal, Jonny.”

“Okay.”

“And they have good prices?” I asked.

“Yeah they’re alright. Look at Albert, what wouldn’t you pay to see that face every day?”

And I saw Albert Hammond, Jr behind those black bars. He looked like a prisoner behind a cell. I would give my dog freedom.

My stepdad agreed to take me and Yordan to the dog rescue but we couldn’t tell Mami. We had to wait until she was napping with Yazmin in the afternoon and that’s what we did. When we pulled up at the rescue, I was convinced we had the wrong address. The building wasn’t really a building. It was a storefront among storefronts. There was a nail salon to the left and a Dunkin Donuts to the right. The sign read “Forest Animal Care” in bold red letters. When we walked inside, I noticed the facility was missing a back wall. Instead, there was a blue tarp tied down to keep out the weather. Being inside the rescue with no AC was worse than being outside. The lights were bright, and added to the heat. We stood at the front counter for ten minutes while staff in scrubs passed us by and never asked if we needed help.

Yordan finally got a hold of one vet tech sprinting to the back. He raised his voice at a young black woman with her hair tied. She was chewing gum and speaking fast. She led us to the cages where they kept the dogs for adoption. There were various cats and dogs behind steel bars and I wanted to save them all. I didn’t even like cats; I was allergic. These cages were worse than jail. At least in jail they gave you a bed. We saw a chihuahua mix, and the woman said her name was “galleta,” but we didn’t want a small dog. The woman said “poodles are great family dogs” and showed us a sad poodle drinking from a half full bowl of water. The last dog in the last cage was a German Shepherd that the woman called “Cosa.” This dog wasn’t happy or sad. The woman kept talking too fast and we were let out a back door by Dumpsters close to a major highway to get acquainted. The dog’s bark cut through the car horns in the street. The vet tech did not have answers to the questions we asked her. Was the dog aggressive, house broken, good with children? The only thing she knew was that the dog had a “level one temperament.” My stepdad was growing impatient; we didn’t have enough time to evaluate the German Shepherd but we took her home all the same. The whole ride back with the dog out of its cage and her head sticking out of the window, I thought about how Jonny had described the animal rescue to me. Why had he lied?

“I knew we couldn’t trust Jonny,” Yordan said. “Did you see how dingy that place was?”

*

When we walked inside casa with Cosa, Yazmin and Mami watched from the living room and cried. Since Yazmin was a one-year-old, she cried at everything. Mami though? She was scared of dogs. In La Romana, when she was a niña, a wild dog had chased her after school and bitten her left leg. She did a good job of covering the scar with maxi skirts. I only saw it when she mopped the kitchen tiles. Its ugliness shocked me every time.

I led Cosa to the living room, her dirty paws leaving prints on the beige carpet. The dog had a long tongue. She dripped saliva on the carpet. Her ears were sharp triangles and her coat had swirls of brown and black. Her paws were magnificent. They were intimidating and large, but she walked with grace despite their extraordinary size.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“He’s a killer,” Mami said.

“He’s a she,” I said.

“Get her out,” Mami said.

Instead, I released the German Shepherd. She did not immediately get up and run around. She stayed put and looked at Mami with concern, since Mami was, in fact, running around, in a panic. Cosa sniffed our feet. I wasn’t sure how my feet smelled but I wasn’t going to get in her way. I ran my fingers from the top of her head down her back. She was warm. Soft. She was like a sabana you could bury your toes in. She licked Yazmin, and Yazmin’s tears turned to laughter.

“She’s not going anywhere,” I said.

“Hell no,” Yordan said.

That was all my twin said before Mami came clocking my arm with a spatula. Cosa started barking. How could anyone hate something so natural? This dog was worried that Mami was hurting me.

Days went by and I got to know Cosa well. If she had her tongue out, making a puddle of saliva on the carpet, I knew she was in a good mood. She made a pool one day in the yard as Jonny Moreira watched.

“What was his name again?” Jonny asked.

“He’s a girl,” I said, “that’s first of all. And her name is Cosa.”

“Yeah,” he said, “looks like a bitch.”

Yordan snapped his fingers and Cosa growled. I didn’t know how to snap my fingers. The intuition these animals had was incredible. They didn’t need to think the way humans did. I loved that. I felt bad that Albert Hammond, Jr. had to live with Jonny.

“My dog is better,” I said, “and smarter and handsomer.”

“Your dog wouldn’t last a night in the Ecuadorian streets. They’d cut her up and turn her into stir-fry. She too soft. You need something more macho. More tough, sabes? That’s why my parents got me Albert from a purebred breeder. He was born to kill.”

“I thought you said you got your dog from the rescue,” I said.

“And your dumbass believed me,” Jonny said. “Immigrants believe anything you tell them.”

I hadn’t considered myself an immigrant until that moment.

“Your dog was born to shit and eat!” Yordan said.

“Take it back,” Jonny said. “I didn’t feed Albert Hammond, Jr. all day and you dumb hicks will be sorry.”

“I was gonna let you off easy,” Yordan said, “picking on my little brother and my dog and such. But then you had to disrespect me and name-call me. Now I’m gonna have to teach you a lesson.”

“Vamos,” Jonny said.

I knew Jonny did not regard me as his friend, but I wasn’t aware we’d become enemies.

He led us to his trampoline and let Albert Hammond, Jr. inside. There was already an iPod station beside the trampoline, which Jonny turned on.

“What’s this cowboy music?” Yordan asked.

“It’s not cowboy. It’s ‘Reptilia’, by The Strokes,” I said.

“At least one of you isn’t all the way dumb,” Jonny said. He smirked.

Albert Hammond, Jr. played his part, stalking around the trampoline with his stiff muscles. Jonny asked us which song we wanted for Cosa’s entrance. I was still considering whether or not we should allow Cosa to fight.

“A dog fight?” I asked.

“They do it back in your country, right?” Jonny asked.

“Mostly rooster fights. They use the dogs for brujeria,” I said.

Jonny said that if we won the fight, we would get one hundred dollars and bragging rights for a month. At my age, that was a come up.

“So if we lose, we owe you one hundred bucks?” Yordan said.

“Yeah.” Jonny made it sound simple.

Yordan pulled me aside. “So what do we do?”

“We can’t let him talk like that,” I said.

“I thought this cabrón was your friend,” Yordan said.

“Apart from Cosa, you are my only friend,” I said.

“Didn’t seem like it when you were shoving controllers up each other’s asses,” he said.

“Do you want to teach this maricón a lesson or what?” I asked.

“I’m in the mood,” he said. “To teach you all a lesson.”

“Fighting each other won’t solve anything. We need to fight him,” I said.

Albert Hammond Jr. looked wired.

“So you got a song or what?” Jonny asked.

“I dunno,” Yordan said.

“I knew you were pussies just like your dog,” he said.

“Play another song by The Strokes,” I said. “How about ‘On the Other Side’?”

Jonny’s eyes widened. He wobbled like a bobblehead. You had to be looking at Jonny the whole time to notice. Then he nodded his head at me in some sort of bro acknowledgement. Maybe Jonny wasn’t a total pendejo after all. We both had decent taste in music.

The song’s deep bass started and soon the real Albert Hammond, Jr.’s guitar riffs came pouring in and the moment felt right, as if Yordan and I had made the right decision.

I pulled Cosa into the walled trampoline by her leather collar and set her loose. I wanted it to be over the minute I let go of her. While Mami and my stepdad and Yazmin shopped at Home Depot, the fight began.

The dogs started barking and snapping at each other as soon as they were zipped into the trampoline together. To my amazement, Cosa instigated the fight by twisting her neck and snapping at the pitbull. Cosa charged once more but her opponent got out of her way. Albert retaliated with a growl that opened into a bark. The two dogs passed one another quickly inside the trampoline, and the bouncing pushed Albert’s into Cosa, knocking her over. Albert glimpsed opportunity and lunged, but she was quick to duck out of the way. The back and forth went on until finally Albert tried his lunge again and connected his jaw to Cosa’s front leg. Cosa struggled and whined. She dragged Albert around the trampoline and bounced up and down until she got tired. She grew exhausted with pain and fatigue and although she had put up a good fight, there was not much left in her.

“Tell him to let go,” Yordan said.

“This is what you wanted,” Jonny said, grinning.

‘This is what you wanted,” I said. “Albert Hammond, Jr, stop.”

It turned out Albert only spoke Spanish and all we had to say for him to let go was “para.” Albert unlocked his jaw from Cosa’s front leg. His teeth and snout were covered in blood. Cosa tried to walk. She pushed her nose against the trampoline’s matted wall. Jonny opened the trampoline’s zipper and took his dog out. Yordan climbed inside to retrieve Cosa.

“You could’ve killed our dog.”

“Albert knows his limits,” Jonny said. “You owe me one hundred.”

“Where are we gonna get a hundred bucks from? We gotta figure out how to fix the dog,” I said.

“Not my problem. Get the cash,” Jonny said.

Our family was at Home Depot, shopping for new air wick plug-ins and other things adults buy at hardware stores. Cosa was panting in Yordan’s arms. I took my t-shirt off and told Yordan to wrap it around her leg. I snuck upstairs to Mami’s room. I was sweating. I knew there were orange and brown rolls of quarters in a shoebox under the bed.

A few days later, Mami interrogated me and Yordan about her missing hundred dollars in quarters. We said we didn’t know anything. She said someone knew something and we had to speak fast por que she had to pay for a salon appointment. I didn’t want to be on Mami’s bad side so I confessed.

She was furious. When she heard that the money was payment for the dogfight in which Cosa had been mauled, she smacked both of us. She also refused to pay for vet care. Instead, she made her famous ginger tea. I asked her if that was safe for dogs to eat because when I consumed it, it burned my throat with spice. All the same she shrugged and said if we wanted real animal care, to pay for it ourselves, which we didn’t.

She poured the ginger tea into a Tupperware, laid the Tupperware on the floor and told me to go get the dog. Cosa limped to the kitchen and sniffed the dish. She licked it a few times, and then she licked it all up.I almost wished I’d stopped Cosa from eating the jengibre but it was too late. Cosa was licking the empty Tupperware.

Cosa dropped to the floor and Mami sat beside her. She started yelling.

“Despierta, despierta,” she said, spreading her hands as if she were about to grasp a bowling ball. “Bound by the forces of nature, I call to you great bacá spirits. Come to our aid.”

By this point I believed Mami was out of her mind. Yordan looked stupefied. His mouth was hanging open. Mami grabbed a wooden mortar and pestle and crushed some herbs and garlic. She spread the mixture over Cosa. A few moments later the wind blew it all over the kitchen, onto the granite countertop, into the sink piled with dishes, onto my arm. Cosa got up and walked to Mami and licked her fingers. Her limp seemed better.

“You owe me one hundred dollars,” Mami said. “I don’t care who did it. You were both involved and you’re both responsible. Get me my money.”

*

I took Cosa out for her first walk since the fight. North Avenue was full of potholes which cars had to zig-zag, as if driving drunk. We approached a red ranch with a porch. There was a patch of grass by the porch and Cosa invited herself to squat on it.

“Hey!”

I turned my head.

“Do you see the sign?”

“What sign?” I asked.

“Curb your dog.”

“I didn’t see the sign, sorry,” I said.

“Well, do you got a bag?”

This ranch dweller was young. He wore a navy Yankees cap backwards and cargo shorts.

“No bag,” I said.

“You really gotta watch it. Folks here pick up after their dogs.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Say, your family just moved on North Ave, right?”

“Yeah, we moved from Sailors Harbor.”

“That’s good, we need more people like you here,” he said.

I found a blue empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos beside the grass where Cosa had defecated. A soft breeze shuffled through the trees, tugging at the brittle orange leaves and scattered twigs around me, reminding me how easily things were forgotten or discarded in this neighborhood. The bag was half-hidden under the brush, the fluorescent lettering still popping in contrast to the earthy hues around it. I crouched down, taking a quick mental note of the peculiar combination—the faint smell of feces mingling with the artificial tang of ranch seasoning.

Cosa looked up at me with innocent eyes, a subtle wag of her tail suggesting she didn’t fully grasp the importance of what had just occurred. I stared back, not sure whether to be frustrated or amused, but I did what needed to be done. I tugged on her leash, guiding her toward the grass so she could finish her business. I wasn’t new to this—cleaning up after a pet, that is—but this particular moment felt like an initiation. This was my first time facing the mess in this particular corner of North Avenue, and I was determined to handle it properly as the ranch dweller applied pressure with his passive-aggressive smile.

I hadn’t yet figured out how things worked around here. North Avenue was a place of contradictions, where neat front yards held a hidden undercurrent of chaos, and neighbors exchanged polite smiles while their eyes told stories of long-held grievances. Yet, as I crouched there, adjusting my grip on the bag, I felt like I was beginning to understand. This wasn’t just about picking up after my dog. It was about fitting in, learning the subtle rules of this place—where trash could be considered someone’s treasure, and a misplaced glance could mean something entirely different than it appeared.

The bag of Doritos, crumpled and empty, now sat heavy in my hand. I tied it with what could only be described as the kind of care one reserves for a delicate artifact—clumsy yet deliberate. I was aware of every movement, my fingers working in slow, methodical motions to avoid a smear. And as I tied it off, I caught the tiniest smear of dirt on my thumb. For a moment, I was disgusted, but then something clicked. I looked at the thumb, now stained with evidence of this small but oddly significant task, and I realized that this was how it worked.