A House with Cannons
by Catalina Bode
Second Runner-Up, 2025 Fiction Contest
I promised him a house with cannons. It was what the rich did in this town, keep green lawns and cannons pointing at passerbys. I said to him, standing in front of the yellow house, come be with me and in five years this can be ours. He looked at me with shame. He did and did not want a house with cannons.
I promised this man everything. I promised the yellow house and an RV to take the children all across this country’s famous highways but he told me that he could not leave his mother. He could not leave his country. We wept because we both knew the baby in me would be born to this desert town and that I would never bring the baby back to the hills where he and I were children.
We talked on the phone and when he couldn’t afford it, we talked less, and when I couldn’t afford it, we didn’t talk at all. In our last call, he made me promise I’d give the last minute on the line with the baby. I pressed the end of the phone to my belly, the vibration of his voice against what was once my spleen, but now the baby’s foot. But after a moment, I took the phone again to my ear. I wanted all the seconds left to myself. I wanted to know what he promised her.
I gave birth to his child without my mother country but with my mother. The English call it mother country. In my language it is fatherland. In German it is also the father. In Russian you can call the land both mother and father but in Indonesia the land belongs to the water. In China the land is neither mother nor father but everyone before them, the land of ancestors. In this country of desert and mountain and sighing green pastures, they call it homeland because for most, this is the land where they have made a life without lineage.
I promised this man everything. I promised the yellow house and an RV to take the children all across this country’s famous highways but he told me that he could not leave his mother. He could not leave his country. We wept because we both knew the baby in me would be born to this desert town and that I would never bring the baby back to the hills where he and I were children.
We talked on the phone and when he couldn’t afford it, we talked less, and when I couldn’t afford it, we didn’t talk at all. In our last call, he made me promise I’d give the last minute on the line with the baby. I pressed the end of the phone to my belly, the vibration of his voice against what was once my spleen, but now the baby’s foot. But after a moment, I took the phone again to my ear. I wanted all the seconds left to myself. I wanted to know what he promised her.
I gave birth to his child without my mother country but with my mother. The English call it mother country. In my language it is fatherland. In German it is also the father. In Russian you can call the land both mother and father but in Indonesia the land belongs to the water. In China the land is neither mother nor father but everyone before them, the land of ancestors. In this country of desert and mountain and sighing green pastures, they call it homeland because for most, this is the land where they have made a life without lineage.
*
The baby did not meet her father until her tenth month. In the end, I brought her back with me. Not for long, I told her father. I had just received my green card. I did not know if they would let me back in. We baptized her in the same church where every cousin and cousin’s cousin received the holy sacrament, everyone blessed a good life by the same man. The baby and her father cried, frightened by the stranger before them. I cried for different reasons, frightened at the strangeness between them.
My mother and father were made godmother and godfather. My mother had the honor a thousand times over, the reliable one to all her sisters and friends and passing acquaintances, but this was her first and only grandchild and so she cried too. This decision was a tender spot between the child’s father and me. He wanted his mother to be in the ceremony but I had already decided the kind of life my daughter would live.
I will not live my mother’s life—a biology teacher of forty years, seventeen of them with her husband in another country. I told him I will not spend my life waiting. I will not raise this child alone. I told him it can be him or it can be another man. There are so many men, so many good men. I did not tell him that he was the best of them. He kissed the baby’s head again and again and again and snuck my favorite fruit in my backpack. Then we disappeared behind the gates of airport security.
My mother and father were made godmother and godfather. My mother had the honor a thousand times over, the reliable one to all her sisters and friends and passing acquaintances, but this was her first and only grandchild and so she cried too. This decision was a tender spot between the child’s father and me. He wanted his mother to be in the ceremony but I had already decided the kind of life my daughter would live.
I will not live my mother’s life—a biology teacher of forty years, seventeen of them with her husband in another country. I told him I will not spend my life waiting. I will not raise this child alone. I told him it can be him or it can be another man. There are so many men, so many good men. I did not tell him that he was the best of them. He kissed the baby’s head again and again and again and snuck my favorite fruit in my backpack. Then we disappeared behind the gates of airport security.
*
We live in the trailer with my father and mother. My father lived here a whole life before my mother joined him, and then I joined them. Thirty-four is such a strange time to begin again, but then beginning is always a strange time. My father tends to the Montessori school down the street. It is where I will send my daughter. The teachers there have such kind faces, young and blushed with voices that sing reprimands like lullabies. It is what I want for my child. For the pain to be easy. When we walk by on the weekends, she sticks her hand out the stroller and grips the school’s wire fence. Each time, I must unpluck her hand finger by finger. Just like you, I say to my mother, ready for school. No, my mother says, just like you.
I clean the teeth of people. I scrape out the plaque. I press at the gums. I brush every tooth, and the edges of the back molars that they never manage to reach. It is easy work, simple work. Back in my country, I found ways to make the body stretch and regrow. I grafted gum from the roofs of people’s mouths. I cured people of disease. Now, I give them plastic bags with little match boxes of floss to forget in the bottom of their drawers. I do this all while my mother watches the baby and when I come home she no longer passes the baby to me because she can tell the spirit is dead in me.
She tells me I can do it all again. My mother is always telling me of life’s possibilities. She says this time, she will make the flashcards. All I have to do is learn everything in English. Already I am doing so well. Her cousin did it. Became doctor twice. The cousin doesn’t have a house with cannons, but the house comes with jacuzzi and pool. It is where we go on the weekends to soften our bodies, tired of sweeping floors and crouching over teeth and picking up babies who crawl into places they should not go.
I call the father of the baby and tell him this is his last chance. He can come and be my husband, the father of his child, or he can weep to his friends over how sorry he is he let his successful American doctor wife slip away.
I clean the teeth of people. I scrape out the plaque. I press at the gums. I brush every tooth, and the edges of the back molars that they never manage to reach. It is easy work, simple work. Back in my country, I found ways to make the body stretch and regrow. I grafted gum from the roofs of people’s mouths. I cured people of disease. Now, I give them plastic bags with little match boxes of floss to forget in the bottom of their drawers. I do this all while my mother watches the baby and when I come home she no longer passes the baby to me because she can tell the spirit is dead in me.
She tells me I can do it all again. My mother is always telling me of life’s possibilities. She says this time, she will make the flashcards. All I have to do is learn everything in English. Already I am doing so well. Her cousin did it. Became doctor twice. The cousin doesn’t have a house with cannons, but the house comes with jacuzzi and pool. It is where we go on the weekends to soften our bodies, tired of sweeping floors and crouching over teeth and picking up babies who crawl into places they should not go.
I call the father of the baby and tell him this is his last chance. He can come and be my husband, the father of his child, or he can weep to his friends over how sorry he is he let his successful American doctor wife slip away.
*
It is another five years before he comes to me. And in three more, another baby. She is unlike anyone I have ever met. She is a performer. She is an all day telenovela megastar. She is making the whole house shake with laughter. She completes us.
*
We are walking downtown with ice cream scoops melting off waffle cones when we pass by the yellow house with cannons. It has just been sold for a price that makes the oldest audibly gasp—money none of us can imagine. My husband looks at me and I see it is a promise he has not let go. The weekend jacuzzi is not enough. Our daughters and our Sunday ice cream and the RV that isn’t ours, but ours to borrow once a summer, stained yellow cushions and all, is not enough. It is not that I have given up. I am tired of scraping teeth. I am tired of flossing lying mouths. But the trying also tires. I have applied to all the accelerated programs in this country for international doctors. The best one accepts three a year and for the past five years none of them have been me.
*
The program that accepts me is three years and three hours by car. The boss for whom I clean teeth is a good dentist, a rich dentist, who instead of buying a second home in Florida, buys the best technology. He gives us all bonuses and mine are always the biggest, though this is a secret I keep because the other girls like me and I want it this way. He is a Chinese man who believes in me. He promises to pay the tuition so long as I come back to work for him. It was done for him and he will do it for me. I tell him I will, and so he sends out an order for the lab equipment to graft gums. It awaits my return.
Even without the worry of tuition, renting a room somewhere is out of the question. But the cousin who is twice a doctor knows a woman in the city with a pool house used by her daughter when she visits, but the daughter is away in London, and so for a year the pool house is mine.
My girls are fourteen and five. They watched their grandmother nearly disappear from cancer and now their mother disappears for teeth. I tell myself I am their mother. They cannot forget me.
Even without the worry of tuition, renting a room somewhere is out of the question. But the cousin who is twice a doctor knows a woman in the city with a pool house used by her daughter when she visits, but the daughter is away in London, and so for a year the pool house is mine.
My girls are fourteen and five. They watched their grandmother nearly disappear from cancer and now their mother disappears for teeth. I tell myself I am their mother. They cannot forget me.
*
The pool house does not smell like chlorine. There are no noodles or nets. It is a beautiful and spacious room with a kitchenette and large windows with remote controlled blinds. The woman who lives in the house charges me two hundred a month. From here, I can walk to campus and live off the leftovers of catered events. I bring with me everywhere two plastic tupperwares. There are always pizza parties and sandwich platters. If I am lucky, the English department has half of a quiche waiting to be tossed.
The other women in the program are much younger than me. Everyone has always told me my English is good, but I cannot understand them. The other women are intelligent and sophisticated and hard-working but incomprehensible. I tell them that they must speak to me like I am their beloved grandmother, the woman who no longer lives in the world outside her apartment cluttered with trinkets. I must catch up, they tell me. Catch up, catch up. They promise to teach me and they do.
Before a big exam I send the women a message of good luck. They ask me what I think it means to send the little picture for bendiciones. They are blessings, I explain. Three blue droplets, it is God’s holy water. They cackle at the table where we sit together after class each day. It is not holy water, they say, but holy orgasm. They change the name of our chat from Baby Teeth to Holy Orgasm.
I study my flashcards in the pool house and the library and on the exercise bike at the university gym. I wish my daughters goodnight each night at nine. The video pixels shake and shimmer with poor connection. Their father tells me he is too busy with the older one’s science project and so I am helping the five-year-old with her addition way past her bedtime. She is running around the house in summer pajamas in the winter, too thrilled to feel the cold in her little toes. I tell her three times to open her math book but she keeps running and laughing because I’m not really there I’m not really there I’m not really there. The math is never done.
When everyone is in bed, I notice seven notifications from the Holy Orgasm chat. The exam results are in. I check for mine. Four more notifications from the Holy Orgasm chat. Another three in the time it takes me to type my response. Everyone passed. Someone sends the picture of water droplets into the chat. Someone else does too. And the others one by one add their blessings to the chat. With every notification I am reminded how long it has taken me to get here.
The other women in the program are much younger than me. Everyone has always told me my English is good, but I cannot understand them. The other women are intelligent and sophisticated and hard-working but incomprehensible. I tell them that they must speak to me like I am their beloved grandmother, the woman who no longer lives in the world outside her apartment cluttered with trinkets. I must catch up, they tell me. Catch up, catch up. They promise to teach me and they do.
Before a big exam I send the women a message of good luck. They ask me what I think it means to send the little picture for bendiciones. They are blessings, I explain. Three blue droplets, it is God’s holy water. They cackle at the table where we sit together after class each day. It is not holy water, they say, but holy orgasm. They change the name of our chat from Baby Teeth to Holy Orgasm.
I study my flashcards in the pool house and the library and on the exercise bike at the university gym. I wish my daughters goodnight each night at nine. The video pixels shake and shimmer with poor connection. Their father tells me he is too busy with the older one’s science project and so I am helping the five-year-old with her addition way past her bedtime. She is running around the house in summer pajamas in the winter, too thrilled to feel the cold in her little toes. I tell her three times to open her math book but she keeps running and laughing because I’m not really there I’m not really there I’m not really there. The math is never done.
When everyone is in bed, I notice seven notifications from the Holy Orgasm chat. The exam results are in. I check for mine. Four more notifications from the Holy Orgasm chat. Another three in the time it takes me to type my response. Everyone passed. Someone sends the picture of water droplets into the chat. Someone else does too. And the others one by one add their blessings to the chat. With every notification I am reminded how long it has taken me to get here.
*
An ice storm catches the desert in the early spring. The program is closed for the mid-semester break and I study while the girls are at school. My mother cuts me mangos just like when I was a girl. Except this time of year, they leave my tongue feeling starched. At the end of each day I wait outside the school gates for my girls. The youngest one runs ahead and the oldest shuffles her feet beside me complaining about the math teacher who shouldn’t be a math teacher. But when the ice comes and the schools shut down and the and power goes the only thing to do is keep warm.
These trailer walls are not made to withstand this cold. We are without the thick glass windows and bubblegum insulation of Minnesota. The girls each wear five pairs of socks. I wear a fuzzy pair with little molars one of the office assistants at work gifted me last Christmas. I give my mother my biggest coat and the girls take turns wearing a single mitten the youngest found under her bed. No one knows where it came from. It is funny the way they pass the time in fifteen-minute intervals of mitten wearing—and then it’s not. We are hungry and there is nothing hot to eat. My mother makes everyone peanut butter sandwiches. They are so dry I dip mine in a cup of cold milk. We hear the horror stories of young children freezing in the night. No one wants to go to bed. My husband takes the youngest and I take the oldest and we wrap our bodies around their little bodies to keep warm.
On day two of the ice storm we turn off our phones to conserve their batteries. On the hour every hour one of us turns on our phone to check the news. At seven in the evening the mayor eats his words on television. Minnesota makes fun of how silly the south is with just a shiver in the weather. We take breaks and sit parked in the gravel driveway just to feel the heat of the car. My fingers find their color again only to lose it. At nine pm we learn of a thirteen-car pileup on the highway. For dinner, more sandwiches and milk.
On the third day my youngest wakes me to say she cannot feel her feet. I take off all five socks and hold her toes in between my palms. She tells me she is a frozen waffle in the toaster. We dream of frozen waffles and sunnyside eggs and hot maple syrup. When their father turns on his phone, he notices a missed call. The house with pool and jacuzzi has power before us.
There are thirteen miles left in the gas tank and the house with pool and jacuzzi is sixteen miles away. We can strand ourselves on the highway or we can turn into six little popsicles under all the blankets in the house. Or, the oldest says, we burn in another pileup. I remind her that her father is the most careful driver.
We drive 45 on the highway. This way, we hope, we make it. Every car passes us. Some honk and then more honk and the oldest threatens the inferno of another pileup and my husband, who, at the moment, is no father, is shaking. After I tell him to pull over, he forgets to signal. A semi blares its horn. His knuckles are ten little ghosts clenching the steering wheel. I turn on the emergency lights. We switch. I pull out onto the highway between two trucks and keep pace. The gas tank empties faster this way but the girls are cold and scared and tired of eating peanut butter sandwiches and this is the way out.
With three miles left we make it. The girls run into the house with pool and jacuzzi. Let there be light! they shout. Let there be heat! Let there be café con leche! We sit at the big table, the one that gets its very own room, and wrap our fingers around mugs of coffee and milk. The mayor is working with the governor to restore power to the rest of the city but can’t say for certain when. By midnight, he says, then two in the morning, then six—the girls fall asleep waiting for the mayor on the TV. Turn it off, my husband tells me. And I tell him I will. He can’t sleep with it on, he complains, but he does. Everyone is a soft lump on the soft couch. My father, upright, snores quietly. My mother is the only one who made it to a bed. On the TV, newscasters stand on the corners of blackout blocks with pink lipstick and down coats with fur trimmed caps. The mayor has not come back as promised but I wait, am waiting, keep waiting.
These trailer walls are not made to withstand this cold. We are without the thick glass windows and bubblegum insulation of Minnesota. The girls each wear five pairs of socks. I wear a fuzzy pair with little molars one of the office assistants at work gifted me last Christmas. I give my mother my biggest coat and the girls take turns wearing a single mitten the youngest found under her bed. No one knows where it came from. It is funny the way they pass the time in fifteen-minute intervals of mitten wearing—and then it’s not. We are hungry and there is nothing hot to eat. My mother makes everyone peanut butter sandwiches. They are so dry I dip mine in a cup of cold milk. We hear the horror stories of young children freezing in the night. No one wants to go to bed. My husband takes the youngest and I take the oldest and we wrap our bodies around their little bodies to keep warm.
On day two of the ice storm we turn off our phones to conserve their batteries. On the hour every hour one of us turns on our phone to check the news. At seven in the evening the mayor eats his words on television. Minnesota makes fun of how silly the south is with just a shiver in the weather. We take breaks and sit parked in the gravel driveway just to feel the heat of the car. My fingers find their color again only to lose it. At nine pm we learn of a thirteen-car pileup on the highway. For dinner, more sandwiches and milk.
On the third day my youngest wakes me to say she cannot feel her feet. I take off all five socks and hold her toes in between my palms. She tells me she is a frozen waffle in the toaster. We dream of frozen waffles and sunnyside eggs and hot maple syrup. When their father turns on his phone, he notices a missed call. The house with pool and jacuzzi has power before us.
There are thirteen miles left in the gas tank and the house with pool and jacuzzi is sixteen miles away. We can strand ourselves on the highway or we can turn into six little popsicles under all the blankets in the house. Or, the oldest says, we burn in another pileup. I remind her that her father is the most careful driver.
We drive 45 on the highway. This way, we hope, we make it. Every car passes us. Some honk and then more honk and the oldest threatens the inferno of another pileup and my husband, who, at the moment, is no father, is shaking. After I tell him to pull over, he forgets to signal. A semi blares its horn. His knuckles are ten little ghosts clenching the steering wheel. I turn on the emergency lights. We switch. I pull out onto the highway between two trucks and keep pace. The gas tank empties faster this way but the girls are cold and scared and tired of eating peanut butter sandwiches and this is the way out.
With three miles left we make it. The girls run into the house with pool and jacuzzi. Let there be light! they shout. Let there be heat! Let there be café con leche! We sit at the big table, the one that gets its very own room, and wrap our fingers around mugs of coffee and milk. The mayor is working with the governor to restore power to the rest of the city but can’t say for certain when. By midnight, he says, then two in the morning, then six—the girls fall asleep waiting for the mayor on the TV. Turn it off, my husband tells me. And I tell him I will. He can’t sleep with it on, he complains, but he does. Everyone is a soft lump on the soft couch. My father, upright, snores quietly. My mother is the only one who made it to a bed. On the TV, newscasters stand on the corners of blackout blocks with pink lipstick and down coats with fur trimmed caps. The mayor has not come back as promised but I wait, am waiting, keep waiting.