Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano

You get out of the recliner (one of those that’s damn near impossible to get out of without a gigantic heave-ho), the one that’s facing the inside altar, and your feet smoosh into the pink carpet.

You open the heavy extra-insulated door, its rubber trim suctioned so hard into the frame that it makes a sucking sound like a dog vacuuming treats, when you pull it open.

You open the screen door, the frigid white aluminum stinging your hand, and you close that screen door as quietly as you can.

The first thing you notice is the cold because you don’t have a coat on (who would, sitting in a recliner in the living/dead room). Then you look for slippers to protect your sockened feet. Just wearing those slippers warms you up quite a bit.

In front of you, beyond the porch, down a brick path, and into the yard, sits the magic wishing well. That’s what you call it. In fact, it’s another place of worship in this house. Your mother wants Buddha to know that she is a faithful follower inside and out. She made your Christian father build this well for her, telling him that if he do that, Buddha and God make good thing for him when he die.

The well has no water. In the middle you find a place where your mother places bowls of pre-packaged food, fruit, and little plastic cups of water (the kind of cups you get in hospitals when they give you medicine). There are strings of lights around the well, twinkling 24 hours a day, and flowers surround and adorn it. There are also fake candles all around the brim of the well. You think, Man, if I were dead, I would totally love to hang out at this well. You imagine your dead family having a blast there, with DJ Buddha Belly.

You make wishes at the magical well, but you’ve never kept track of which ones, if any, have come true. You figure, your mom does it too—but she’s always so angry that it looks like her wishes never come true, despite her kneeling in reverence on the jaggy cement blocks, her grey prayer robes grazing the ground with its submission and her fervent belief that if she prays hard enough, good things will happen. They will. Maybe not in this life, which she’s pretty much given up on, but in the next, when she wants more than anything to have a life as a man.

You’re sad, watching your mother in supplication like that. In front of a well that has no water. Just a bunch of plastic, cement, metal, and all these wishes. Actually, you’re not sure anymore if you would like to hang out here when you’re dead.

You go back inside. It’s warm. The grandfather clock chimes some demarcation of time. You sink back into the quick-sand recliner, and you imagine your picture in the altar someday, and you imagine that it would be cool to hang out here after all because now your father’s picture, no, several of them, are here. And you make the most solemn and earnest wish ever: to be with Dad again, here, there, anywhere.