Pushcart Nomination Announcement

Our third nominee for this year’s Pushcart Prize is Brenda Peynado’s story “Carnaval” (35.1).

Read the excerpt below, then purchase a subscription to Pleiades here.

 

Brenda Peynado

Carnaval

Because we married in New York, where his people had lived for the last two hundred years, we will honeymoon in the Caribbean, where mine had lived for the last two hundred years.

Let’s go on a cruise, Jared says. That way we can see all of it.

His relatives, tightrope walkers who string up paths between skyscrapers because they like the way the city looks wavering through the air as distant grid, approve.

We leave during Carnaval, the season of masks and parades. We climb the gangway burdened with luggage, up towards the cruise ship with a billion windows looming in the sky. I have such hopes for our fragile marriage, that he will become more, even, than the myth I dressed him in like a suit for our wedding night. Jared holds my hand and like this we rise through our passport check, our luggage check, the all-aboard photo opportunity, and the ship-wide emergency drill. The Caribbean yawns for us like a blue mouth. The sea breeze smells like fish and salt and mermaids wailing for me to come home. It feels real to me, so real.

*

We stand in rows of twenty, the little lifeboats that will hold us strung up on the railings of the ship like little clouds. The eighteen others who would float with us if we went down: three smiling crew members; two ancient men in a wheelchair, each with a young nurse helping them with life vests and adjusting their lap blankets; an obese, pasty family of eleven shift their considerable weight from foot to foot. Jared kisses the back of my neck, and I feel warm and faint, stewed in a happiness as fat as a mango. If I am a myth for him as well, I like how it feels. The ship horn blares our pushing out of port. Our life vests inflate at our pull like our chests puffed up with happiness and expectation.

*

A note posted to our door informs us the crew has taken our cellphones, our binoculars, and our bottles of liquor. To make the journey more immersive, they say, and to not mess with the ship’s navigation. I start to think something has gone really wrong.

Oh, I’ve heard they do this, Jared says.

I force myself to stay calm. We will be happy, I remind myself. We will have seen each other’s homes. We will know each other.

Jared throws me on the bed. My shirt floats up above my head, the cloth grazing my lips as I kiss his skin. My bra unhooks with a snap. The TV flickers on with a pop, volume blaring a calypso song.

What is that? Jared yells.

Our own faces smirk back at us from the television. We hold hands up the gangway, we nuzzle in each other’s life vests, we ogle the obese passengers of our life boat, we enter the bedroom. All of this on the television above. Other people we don’t know flash above us in similar sequences. The top of the screen reads, Happy cruisers, buy your video of memories on your last day! You are about to see the entire Caribbean!

Are there cameras in our room? I yell. I pull the pillows off the bed. I poke my head out the balcony where the sea licks in giant rolling tongues.

I feel suddenly naked. We put our clothes back on.

We sit on the balcony and listen to the roar of the sea. Jared’s yell echoes in me, rattling, and already I begin to wonder if I can change him. I imagine underneath the water a volcano that at any moment can make us rise and cherish our last moments in each other’s company.

I say, We can be more open than we’ve ever been in our lives, we are tied together now.

He said, We were already tied together. Besides, my parents said now we will understand each other even less.

We look out at the ocean together as if that’s all we are, flat and glassy as a sleeping sea.

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