The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) Read Online Free

mothers don’t work at all. She’s never met one but from books and television she knows they exist. They are big, smiling women with enormous breasts. Not like her mother, still so skinny, still so much like a teenager that the truck drivers all call her muchacha . Up all night and sometimes she even dances with them. It’s embarrassing.
    On the weekends her mother sends Mia out to the highway to wave down the men with soft drinks and packages of fruit. Pretty little Mia, big eyes like her mother, a polystyrene box strapped around her neck, the weight supported by her hands. The trucks loom over her like moving buildings, shiny and noisy. Her shoulders get tired but the more she sells the lighter the burden. Her mother won’t let her work after school, only the weekends. Her mother says, School is more important, with school you can get out of here.
    The money she makes on the weekends goes into a jar just for her. It pays for schoolbooks, shoes and socks, a pink plastic lunchbox. Other kids spend their pay on junk but she can take anything she wants from the shop. Her mother always says that Mia is good to help pull her weight because it’s just the two of them, they’re in it together. When her mother sees the drivers slip Mia an extra coin, she doesn’t take it away. There’s no reason to hide her tips from her mother, but sometimes Mia doesn’t say anything. Sometimes the drivers give her twenty-, fifty-peso notes. There is a small pile of these notes under the jewellery box covered in pink satin, which was a gift from her aunt. When she lifts it up to look at the colourful money she has a tired feeling in her stomach as if she has eaten too much candy.
    Many of the drivers stop and come into the shop to eat and drink, and most of them buy the little packets of powder to stir into their coffee. Everyone drinks the coffee, there are jars of it on every plastic-covered table. But the powder is hidden away. Once a month the tall man comes to see her mother. Her mother closes the shop and Mia stays in her room listening to them talk in whispers. There is nothing between her mother’s room and her own but a thin wall. There are plastic sounds and tearing sounds and the smell of money. Her mother says, Mia, we are in this together, we have no secrets from each other. No secrets but the tall man.
    The tall man will be back soon. Her mother is always anxious for a day or so before he comes. She moves faster, her voice gets higher, she turns into a whirlwind and then crashes and sleeps for hours.
    Mia peers out her window into the dark where the insects are singing in a choir now, the sound as thick and tangled as the jungle.
    She has been told it’s dangerous outside after dark, and she knows her mother means the highway, but Mia thinks also of the men in the jungle. Some nights she sees their shadows coming out of the bushes, hears the sounds of sucking and tearing, the zippers and belts. From her window she sees the men climb back into their trucks. She sees the lights of their trucks come on and hears them roar away. They are always gone before dawn.
    Mia’s mama gives it to them , the boys at school say. Once or twice she has asked her mother if someone is there in the house with them. Mia, there is no one, it’s all in your imagination, her mother says. It’s just you and me, remember that .
    The pact between Mia and her mother is as complicated as the spiders’ webs that stretch between vines and tree limbs in the jungle, which move in the wind and with the swing of the branches. Strong and delicate at the same time. Stringy and see-through and sticky as sugar.
    After Mia goes to bed her mother doesn’t close the shop for hours, not until the last customer is fed, and sometimes the men sit around all night smoking cheap cigars and drinking beer, or pull up their trucks in the dark to order more little packets to stir into their instant coffee. They scratch their feet at the table, fart and belch, sing and