THE SIDEWALK'S CLENCHED JAW

            When El Esposo, the husband, opened the front door of his house with his right hand on the door knob, when his right foot hit the wooden floor of his porch while at the same time he put his left hand into his pocket to dig out his car keys—this was when he saw it, all over the pavement where pedestrians made their life’s way.

            El Esposo, the husband, out of habit, pressed the UNLOCK button on his key-apparatus. He heard a muffled BLARP BLARP, the car’s response. But he could not see the car.

            Which is to say, this is what El Esposo, the husband, saw when he opened the door and looked out to the world / the neighborhood / the street: first, the house cat, which had never liked the house, standing on the concrete walkway that ran from the porch to the sidewalk. The cat was standing on the walkway like it would have any day, except that it was unmoving, because the concrete had swallowed its paws, as if the pavement had become a liquid monster, crawling up the cat’s legs and then solidifying once its hold on the cat was secure. It left the cat paralyzed at the feet and agonizing everywhere else.

MEOW MEOW, went the cat, after the car’s BLARP BLARP.

The car, which had been standing on the driveway the whole night, was completely covered in cement: it looked now like a huge gray block, its identity consumed by the concrete. El Esposo, the husband, did not think of how he could still hear the muffled BLARP BLARP even though the car was trapped. This is because he then looked ahead at the mailbox of his neighbor, also fully enveloped by concrete—and then at his neighbor, who was standing beside the mailbox, or rather, hunched beside it, like he was picking something up.

His name was Tomás Thomas, and he was an arthritic fifty-five year-old. His condition notwithstanding, he stubbornly went to pick up the paper every morning, and when he bent down, El Esposo, the husband, thought, it must have felt like many rusty tubes inside him were creaking with pain. Tomás Thomas’s wife had always protested about it. “You’ll fall and die,” she used to say. But Tomás Thomas replied: “You would like that,” to which she wouldn’t respond. So the old man would pick up the paper without fail, every morning at 6 o’ clock. It was now 7 o’ clock, and he was still there, hunched down, picking up the paper, stuck in mid-motion.

The concrete covered about half of Tomás Thomas’s body. Only his torso, his left arm, and his face were spared by the pavement’s slow upward crawl. The pain of all those creaking bones was visible on his tattered face, and tears trickled down the tracks that his wrinkles had paved.

            “Oh no!” El Esposo, the husband, shouted.

            “God no!” Tomás Thomas yelped.

            “Oh My Tomás!” Tomás Thomas’s wife called out, and El Esposo, the husband, turned his head to Tomás’s house. Tomás Thomas’s wife was peeking her head out from the second-floor front window, her arms outstretched, her face wearing an expression similar to her husband’s. “Oh, Tomás! What’s wrong with you?!” she screamed.

Then she turned to El Esposo, the husband. “Esposo!” she cried. “We have to call the firemen!”

            El Esposo, the husband, turned away from the pleading face of the old lady. He opened the door to his home and went in.

            What it must have been like! he thought, standing with his back to the door, his hands pressed against it, trying to push away what was happening outside. To see the sidewalk open up like a wolf’s mouth and bite you, to become stuck in the sidewalk’s clenched jaw.

            He shirked the thought as he ran to the kitchen, only to gratefully see that his wife and son were sitting down at the wooden table, their feet on the wooden floor, their hands holding metal spoons. There was no concrete in the wooden house, the husband realized. But they would want to know why none of them would ever set foot outside the house.