Purple mountains and one that looked like a saddle. I was in Monterrey again. Streets here looked like pictures of Spain I saw once in a magazine, old and pebbled. I walked on the sidewalk, neon signs for drugstores glowing.

Then, I heard a woman scream, making me cover my ears because it was so loud.

Two cars, one a lime-green taxicab and the other a small two-door Japanese one, had just smashed into each other. Blood across the windshield. In the Japanese car, a couple is squirming to get out, moaning. The taxicab has a woman in it, middle-aged, long black hair, pressing her hands against her window, trying to get out. People start to crowd around.

I try to look away, but can’t move my eyes. I want to look.

And I hear the screams from the taxicab. Like the wails of a little girl: long, undulating, deep heartfelt cries of hurt. I can’t see her face. I try to walk over to the car but someone grabs me from behind, stopping me. I look behind me and its Tia Licha dressed in a flowery red dress like she wears every Sunday to Mass, her black hair done up nicely. Tears in her eyes. Her head is shaking, telling me not to look, not to go, but I can’t help it.

Mami was bleeding. I knew that much. But, instead, I look at the two cars, and notice how quiet it all is. The silence after a crash--how everything is so still. Tia Licha is behind me, sobbing. I looked at her, wanting to cry too.

“You looked so much like her. Your face, the cheeks--you have her cheeks. I loved her so much. But what she did I can’t forgive her for. She was strong, but she was hardheaded, too. And she got what God gave her.”

I looked back at the two cars.

Then, I woke up.

* * *

Wearing a white Kafka T-Shirt that read in small letters You Didn’t Love Him Enough across the bottom and a striped tan-colored scarf with some dark blue jeans, I blinked. Two white kids, both wearing jeans way too big for them, stared at my bright green Adidas. Sitting on a new bus, an old blue and white iBook laptop warmed my legs. I was coming home from work. I had wasted another day typing HTML code and copyediting some teenager’s dumb blog entry about what clothes she bought today. I wanted to walk out of the office, not say a word to anyone and never come back. But, I had rent to pay.

I worked for this huge company that had recently bought out the webzine that hired me. It started in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz and after it got in all kinds of magazines and a bunch of other websites, this huge media company bought them out. Thousands of kids went to it everyday to share shit about their lives and I helped sell it to marketing firms. I looked at my wobbly reflection in the window.

Numbing my dark brown hands, the sun was going down.

Hitting a bump, the bus almost threw my laptop on the ground. Grabbing it, I saw an opened blog--someone’s photos. Nameless person, someone I had never met or probably would ever meet, took one photo a day in LA and would post it. Every time I opened the site, I would remember the same thing.

I had never seen a picture of Mami’s face before. I didn’t even know what she looked like even though Tia Licha told me I looked just like her. They say she didn’t like pictures taken of her, that she avoided cameras. And years later, no one had any pictures of her, not that I knew of, not even baby ones of her in Monterrey or ones of her holding me like I imagine she did, when I was little.

I’m twenty-five and never been out of the country.

Looping on my laptop was a video clip that I left open from when I was at my office fifteen minutes ago, of the president giving the middle finger to the camera when he was running for governor. I looked up and watched the people on the bus. Pakistani couples, two of them, talked to each other in an almost perfect English about the recent earthquake. An old black man, had to be at least seventy, sat a few seats from me flipping through The Los Angeles Times business section, shaking his head and coughing periodically. I looked at my black calculator watch that I bought from a thrift-store off of Fairfax. Driving was for everyone--rich, poor, probably even the homeless. But, if you were really, really poor, you rode the bus. I was on this thing because I wrecked my car two weeks now, now stuck in a shop off of Pico, next to all these other repair shops. These people make their living on the death of others, watching cars crumble like paper bags of fast food. And they smile when you walk in the door.

Like the dream I had last night.

I looked down again, at the computer screen with the huge glare. I smelled my own breath and it was kind of nasty from the Italian food I had on a late lunch. Reached for my bright red purse to see if I had some gum, but there was nothing but a blank sheet of paper, pictures I cut out from last week’s LA Weekly, my driver’s license and a credit card. With my left hand, I scratched my thin nose. Dark brown fingers moved nervously. I pushed my clear plastic frames from sliding down my nose.

Loud giggles took my eyes off the screen. With a whispery voice, the girl across from me was talking real loud, and then, in a split second, she jumped out of her seat and slammed her feet on the floor, hitting the tips of my shoes because my feet were stretched out. Hurting, I looked at this damn girl like I wanted to kill her. But she sat down again and didn’t even see me. She just kept talking to this sitcom-looking guy. Short, choppy brown hair, clean-shaven face: he was what white girls always got. I never, ever talked loud in public places and I hated people who did. I kept my mouth shut and just listened.

“Yesterday, I was watching MTV en español. I was stoned as hell and they had all these crazy videos from Mexico on there. Weird electro bands like Mannequin Lazer, PLASTICGOD, Niña, and some DJ who wouldn’t stop smoking cigarettes. Blurry and shit, I couldn’t think straight!”

I took a second to look around the bus, to see if anyone else was listening, which they weren’t. My toes still hurt. Buzzing made me turn around and I listened to the shitty elevator jazz coming out of the thirty-something woman’s white iPod ear buds next to me. I wanted to rip those little white headphones off and eat them.