"Alicia’s Version of the Possibilities"

This is fact. In the Ring camera video, Michael can be seen leaving his childhood home at 2:00 am on a summer night where the evening temperature never dipped below 85 degrees; the day was 105. He did not bother to open the windows in the night to let the cool air in as his mother used to before closing the house up in the late morning to keep the air-conditioner-free-house from becoming too hot. It was July 3rd. His immigrant parents had loved the 4^th of July. He did not. He is carrying a small knapsack on his back and a liter water bottle in his left hand. He walks over to the same non-descript black or gray car he’s owned for thirty years that he has never driven out of the county. His late mother’s car is parked on the right covered in dust. He is headed—where? Where does one go at 2 am with a knapsack and a bottle of water and a lowered head? He pauses before getting into the car and looks back at the house.

This is fiction. I want Michael to be sneaking away from this house, and it is not his parents’ house, but his lover’s instead, and her husband will be home in the morning. And so he is not glancing at the house as if it is his childhood home, but rather the house of his lover. The scent of her on his skin as he bent her head to his chest lingers.

This is both. I want Michael to be saying goodbye to the home that gave him cancer, the home that stunted his growth. He moved away from the non-descript post World War II house once for two years and into one built at the town’s founding in 1890 instead. He loved old things. He collected old and rare books and sold them sparingly to pay his way through college. He doubled in creative writing and studio art. He painted a replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the wall by the staircase leading up to his first and only apartment. He loved it there. There, he almost dated. Almost sold a painting. Almost sold a story. He almost started a square-foot garden in back, but his neighbors beat him to it, though they gave him anything he wanted from their garden. He came home when his father became ill to help, and that was twenty-some-odd years ago and he was going to be there for six months just to help get the house in order should his father pass away.

This is backstory. His parents, from Bari, Italy, had never fully acclimated to the southern Californian suburb where they lived. Their English never lost its accent. Their two eldest children shed their Italian; their youngest, Michael, attempted to learn it in college and it never quite took hold. The American, they called him. The two eldest children did the very American thing of growing up, getting married, and moving into houses of their own; everyone in their tidy nuclear center visiting on some Sundays and all the bigger holidays, where the grandkids would attempt making Italian cookies with their grandmother for ten minutes before heading to the family room to play video games. His sister married well, then divorced well, and kept the house. His brother did the same.

This is dream. Michael, the only one born in the United States, dreamed of someday going to Bari. There he would meet the woman of his dreams. She would whisper Italian in his ear, and he would understand, and she would breathe close to him, on his neck, so that he felt her presence clear down to his toes. In his dreams, this mystery woman looks like a young Sophia Loren and he presses her against the wall of a cave in the countryside and kisses her until she begs for him to take her right there in the afternoon sun. A slight breeze is blowing.

This is premonition. One liter bottle of water. One small knapsack. No camping gear. Full moon. Coyotes howling in the distance. His car is found a few miles away from his parents’ home. It is unlocked. The water bottle is in the front passenger seat, a swig of it gone but the cap placed back on it tightly so as not to leak onto the frayed fabric of the seat. The knapsack is on the floor on the passenger’s side, along with a flashlight that he kept in the car and the remnants of an apple core and his flip phone. The car is located on a suburban street of no particular distinction, parked near a pink soundwall with moderate graffiti. The bougainvillea and the night blooming jasmine are overgrown and nature is attempting a comeback through the cracks in the sidewalk. Asparagus ferns and crab grass intertwine. A stray palm frown is gently swaying.

This is what it is. He used to sit at an outdoor café in Uptown Whittier for hours on end, during the days when most other people worked; he sketched illustrations for stories he might one day write. His sketchbooks filled over and over again. He made friends with a poet from Italy who worked construction early in the morning and knocked off around one or two in the afternoon. Dominic encourages him to keep going, to let people see his magnificent work. His parents ask him when will he get a real job? When will he get a girlfriend? Dominic buys him coffees, sits with him and plays his guitar, sometimes sings in Italian for Michael who appreciates the company some days. Some days he leaves by noon to avoid his friend.

This is mobilization. In the coming days, Michael’s sister and brother will call his phone repeatedly. There will not be an answer. An agent was due to the house to assess how much the siblings could get for it, despite the termites and the never replaced wall-to-wall shag carpet and the vintage wood paneling. Split three ways, they could pay off their mortgages and stick the rest in their kids’ college funds. They will help Michael find a one-bedroom condo. The house is far too big for just one person, they’ve reminded him repeatedly. They will help him clean it out, hire people to help him. They both have full-time jobs. They are exasperated; only pick up the phone, Michael. He has given them the cold shoulder before. It is not unexpected behavior.

This is frantic. Graciela is the first one to visit the house and notice the car gone and the door locked. He has not left a note. She opens the door to her brother’s room. It is not tidy. Bookcases cover every inch of it, just like in the garage where his online bookshop is. The bookcases make the small room feel smaller; it feels like a tomb. She goes to the kitchen where his laptop is. In the coming days, she will hire someone to break his passcodes. He has left no notes for her of any kind. She is certain he is missing. Flies and gnats are eating what was left in the frying pan on top of the stove. The days are still above 100 degrees. The nights bring no relief. Graciela calls her brother Antonio. He curses into the phone that their brother has fucked them. You have to wait months to sell a house, maybe a year, if one of the owners can’t be found. What the fuck does his brother think he’s doing? Michael’s niece makes flyers with her uncle’s photo on them. Michael looks young and old at the same time in these flyers: part changling, part unlived. There are the hint of wrinkles and some white hair flecking his beard. But he does not appear to be a man of almost 60.

Antonio calls the police to report their brother missing the same day Graciela called him from the house. He tells her to stay there; he’s on his way. She throws the pan into the trashcan on the side of the house rather than attempting to clean off the decaying fish. The neighbor’s cat jumps onto the lid of it and howls.

This is frustration and fact and fiction. Filing missing person reports on middle-aged men is problematic. The policeman tells Graciela that her brother, a grown man of fifty-eight, is under no obligation to tell her of his whereabouts. It’s a slow day at the precinct, gang activity low. He suggests she goes through his contacts. There could be simple explanations. He has five contacts left in his address book he’s had since the 80s. There were never many numbers in it. Graciela calls all of the numbers and enlists Dominic to help her. Are there more people than this? Maybe Michael took a vacation? Graciela’s daughter makes a facebook page and puts up his photo in a few of the town’s group pages. Have you seen my uncle? She describes him as sweet and different and harmless. She misses him and recalls how he taught her how to draw and paint. Antonio takes himself to a dive bar in the town next door. Throws back Crown Royals. Calls the real estate agent to cancel the appointment. Toasts the air to his parents and curses his brother. He’s too loud for the sparsely filled room that smells like the ventilation in the kitchen hasn’t been cleaned in decades. He orders a plate of jalapeno poppers to balance out the Crown Royals. He calls his new wife and tells her he won’t be home for a while.

This is the retracing of steps. Michael’s band of friends dispersed a few years after the earthquake. The ones with that small shot of success, and that ability to fake a smile left for the west side. The one who was married bought a double-wide trailer in Fontana. Last time he heard anything from Brad, his wife had had their fourth and last child and was back to work as a registered nurse. Brad was home struggling with his novel and household chores and always late to pick up the kids from school. Chuck had died in an accident that was not an accident. You couldn’t convince Michael, knowing what he knew about Chuck, that he didn’t go head first into that semi on purpose. Chuck’s daughter had overdosed but not without letting the world know that her daddy had touched her as well as helped her shoot up from time to time. Stephen had scampered away pretending he wasn’t from the suburbs. Chad, well, we all knew what happened to Chad: about to be indicted, he hung himself in his own closet in his childhood home. His parents preceded him in death by two and three years respectively, but their only son had never filed any paperwork, so the social security checks kept appearing. Michael and were once best friends but Michael never took that grift of Chad’s well. Amber and I had both moved away: me to the Sierras, Amber to Portland or was it San Francisco?

Is he up there in Portland with you? He didn’t leave a note or anything about where he was going. The question came in a text in the middle of my shift at the decrepit resort on the lake. I was a nine-hour drive from Portland and did not recognize the phone number. And, as if the texter could read my mind across the ether, I received a second text. This is Graciela. Michael’s sister. He always talked about you, and how much you meant to him and your phone number was on his desk. So we thought he may have gone to see you.

I don’t live in Portland. Never have. Perhaps you have me confused with someone else. Amber, maybe? But even as I wrote those words, I knew that I was, indeed, more than likely the woman he spoke about. It might have been one of the reasons Michael and I never talked any more. Our friendship from college had devolved from kindred spirits from an incongruous town that sported both a great books program in its high schools and the closing of all bookstores within the city limits. He had owned one of those bookstores. I called Amber at the last number I had for her. Once, when she was really messed up on ecstasy, she’d made out with Michael and he fell in love. It messed him up for years; the slip up had horrified her.

This is memory. He used to text me from the ER while the staff attended to his mother. A frequent flyer. Blood transfusions. His mother, in her 90s, feared death—for what would happen to her baby boy after she died? She would teach him all her recipes. He would share them with us but leave out one secret ingredient each time. I never tried to make them, but I told him that I had and that they were never as good as his mother made, and I could feel his pride over the phone.

This is memory. I hadn’t heard from him in three months and he arrived on my doorstep with a thick envelope. Inside the envelope was a 10-page letter on yellow legal pad written in extra fine pen on how much I sucked as a person. How much of a whore I was because I’d dated too many men. The last line: and so, I’m breaking up with you. Michael, I said, you cannot break up with someone you were never with. We weren’t that type of relationship for each other. A few years later, I received a note card, written with an extra fine pen on every useable space of the inside of the card and on the back. It was mostly about being sorry.

This is a suggestion. Did they look in Brea Canyon? He liked to hike there, and it wasn’t all too far from his parents’ house. Or maybe the trail in Whittier up to the water tower, but then how would he have? It was so hot and he left the water in the car.

His niece to the internet: have you seen my uncle?

The internet to his niece: we will pray for your family.

Have you checked the hospitals? Have you checked the homeless encampment under the freeway? The one at park?

The Santa Ana riverbed? Is he special needs? Does he have problems? Developmental delays?

This is history. In the introduction of the Carson McCuller’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, her friend Tennessee Williams writes of there being people of two worlds within our same world. The world of artists and the world of everyone else and they do not follow the same rules or answer to the same gods. They are not beholden to each other. They cannot understand. They will mock; they will judge. They cannot love.

This is prayer. He is gone. Leave him be. Do not pray for him. He had no god, but the paper and the pen and perhaps now and then, the muse. He tried to write, but he was in the habit of editing his mind and his heart. He had a brush with death early on: Hodgkins at 19 and he survived. He lived so he could do something, he said, and then he waited for when the time was right. When the time would come, he would go to Bari. He would start his life where his parents began. He was sure of it. He just needed a bit more time. I pray to the sky. To the ether. To our own gods. Find my old friend.

This is a wish. Michael, oh, Michael. You did something on a full moon night, on the hottest day of the year. It was still 85 degrees at 2 am. You would have known that would be too much, too hard. Like surviving cancer. A miracle of survival. Peace.

This is fact. When the technician broke into Michael’s computer, Graciela and Antonio went to town on his search history. Google search bar: how to die. How to die outdoors. How to die at home. How to cope with terminal illness. When cancer comes back. How to keep a house from being sold out from under you. They knew it. They knew it. Graciela lit two candles in the church that Sunday. One for her mama and one for her mama’s best friend: Michael. She wondered how her brother would ever get along without their mother. Now she knew.          

This is fiction. On a hot July night, on the eve of the country’s birthday, Michael Esposito left his parents’ home. He’d been orphaned at the age of 58 by the recent death of his mother, whom he took care of the last 15 years while his siblings created families of their own. He drove his car about a mile from a trailhead in Brea Canyon and took nothing with him, not even a flashlight. The full moon accompanied him on his hike. When he’d climbed to a vista point at the top of a hillside he used to frequent when he was younger and did plein air painting, he stopped. He took out a flask from his pants pocket that was not seen in the surveillance video. Though he was not a drinker, he drank down the equivalent of four shots of whiskey and sat down on a nearby rock to await his fate. The cancer had returned and kept him both up at night from the pain, and fatigued him greatly. He could not—at that point—have walked down the path and to his car parked a mile away. He waited for the possibilities. He thought about dying in Bari rather than Brea Canyon, and that he’d never actually seen the place except in photographs and his parents’ stories. He thought about the women he’d never asked out, and the stories he never wrote down, and of the murals he’d planned for his parents’ home that he never did—though he had done one in the garage of the Last Supper. His eyesight was failing. A coyote walked slowly toward him and as the creature got closer, it turned into a young Sophia Loren. She put out her hand to him and he reached out and took hold of it. She circled him like a maypole dancer, their arms, the ribbons. She came closer and sniffed his torso, his legs, his feet. She growled a bit under her breath, and leaped onto him. It startled him. His head hit the rocks. His body felt cool, even if the blood felt warm. She licked the sweat off his face. Twice. And then moved off of his chest and circled him once more. She gave a mournful howl, then walked towards the moon and disappeared.

This is fact. In early December of that year, as people were getting ready for the holidays and the day grew dark in the late afternoon, a bone thin, homeless man in a torn and dirty gray hoodie, tripped and fell next to a sign pointing out the entrance way to the local hospital’s emergency room. An ER nurse on his way in spotted him a little while later. First response crew from the hospital came out with a stretcher. The homeless man was unresponsive. Through the stench of the unwashed body, the EMT—whose own mother had died from a long battle with cancer, smelled the disease on the man. The police were called for a John Doe. They called Graciela. It had been a long time. At the morgue the next morning, she could not be certain it was her brother. She called Antonio, who took one look at the man on the slab and pronounced that the corpse was indeed Michael. The house went up for sale the following week, now split two ways, not three.

This is a hope. Michael Esposito is living in the old world with a new lease on life. The room he rents from a kindly elderly lady is on the second floor and looks out onto the Adriatic Sea. She has given him permission to paint anything he likes on the walls. There is no language, nor any other kind of barrier. When not painting in his room, he takes his sketchbook down to the café on the corner and orders espressos to rent the table for a few hours. The owner—whose daughter waits the tables and is a reminiscent of a young Sophia Loren, would never tell him to leave. They’ve pinned up some of his illustrations on the walls of the café. He does his sketches in extra fine pen and has recently begun to write stories. The waitress lightly touches the back of his hand with her fingers. He looks up at her and she smiles back. She refills his cup.

Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the short story collections Chicana Noir & Other Stories, (El Martillo Press, 2026), Graft (Tolsun Books, Inc 2022), and the poetry collection the daughterland poems (El Martillo Press, 2023). She is the author of two the poetry chapbooks Iconistas!, Burn Scars, (Lit Kit Collective, 2025, 2022), and the co-editor of the anthology Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country (AK Press, 2025), a 2025 Golden Poppy Award finalist. She wants to start a middle-aged feminist punk band.