NOT ALL SHORT STORIES CAN COME FROM DREAMS, ONE.

1.

They waited for him to give the order. He didn't want to.
"It's the law, Mick," Joe muttered, "we got to move them out before..."
Before they take over, you mean to say, but won't...

- From The Mayor of East San Miguel

We were all sleeping over at grandmother's house the year after she died; that was when I woke up from her dreams after midnight, and remembered. I had found the hidden room piled high with old books and papers.

"What's that?" my son asked me.
"Grandfather's pipe tobacco."

The old woman saved everything.
My God, just look at it.

2.

When she was still alive she used to ask me to walk around the corner to Jag-in-the-Bag and buy burgers for her and me. She would have corrected my language but that's the way the kids were talking at school. If they told you to jump off a cliff into the ocean, would you? I smiled. She was talking to herself again. She was telling me to jump off the cliff with her language lessons. I didn't care any more. What mattered was all the rest of it. How grandfather built the crystal palace of Spanish arches, and chased the Chinese back to Mexico. What mattered was how she flew with him into the clouds for the First War, before he turned into another fat politician. It was all for money. But where is it now? Hidden in the old books, burnt up in crumbling real estate deals that never came off. Now it's too late, the market has burst. And of course, the Chinese came back. They always do. Except that now they are Mexicans, and I married one.

My children are turning Japanese.

3.

It was different two hundred years ago when great great grandmother married her yankee from Boston. Then it was supposed to be peaceful. The nations would come together in trade and...

But the Yankees took California anyway.

4.

It's amazing how accurate Li I and me can dream her house after all these years. I have returned to the sea. Her kitchen still sparkles with blue metal and 1920s gas. Outside, the back window smiles into the yard. Her banana tree struggles in the sunny spot where it has survived several freezing snaps, only burning back to its root before growing out again next spring. "It's like the damn Chinese," she growls in my nightmares, under her breath.

She knows she daren't say "Mexican" — not to me. I already know our history.

What she doesn't know is we were Chinese, even before then. The great poem fleets of Admiral Li Po crossed the Bering strait (didn't call it that, of course). Worked their way south to Santa Barbara and Acapulco, where they left their signature stone anchors, and caught the Pacific trade winds back east again, past Hawaii toward the middle kingdom. Then the emperor forbade any more world-girdling armadas. The end.

So the doors closed on another dream, and I am left to gaze out the back window. She is dead twenty years now, and her house rented out. We are just now putting on a new roof. I notice how accurately I can still dream the place after all these years.

And furthermore, there is always la China Poblana. You can't get any more Mexican than that, and that, too, is Chinese, in any language.

5.

Don Ramón's great-grandmother was an Aztec woman taken by his Spanish grandfather as a house-servant, not knowing she was his mother. Only when she died did she tell him, and his step-mother confirmed it. He was adopted. Infant abandoned at birth. The shock of finding this out so upset him that he ran away to the new province and buried his head in California sand. Never learned Nahuatl. What he did not know at the time was his daughter, too, would marry on the other side of the fence. A yankee, back then, was somehow worse than Chinese. They, it seems, were much too close for comfort for the count of Popocatepetl to stop.

Then they sent an army to attack Mexico City. The Halls of Montezuma. But he was an old man, then, far away, in el pueblo de nuestra señora la reina de Los Angeles de porcienculos. One of his granddaughters would became an old movie star, famous for her sultry Latin pout that loomed off of a thousand silver screens before talkies killed her. Another daughter pretended to be a gringo and turned her back on the Chinese when time came to shove. It was her grandson who found the dream where it all began over in San Miguel, just down the coast from Aluminum City.

That was this. One. Time. Again. Me.

Yes, grandmother, I meant to say "me" - okay?

Silence.

"I", mijo; debes decir "I", no "me", ¿verdad?
Oquei abuela, si me dice usted que es asi, pues, bueno, es asi.
Gracias, 'Nielito, gracias. Nos vemos cuando sueñes de mi otra vez, entonces.
Si, 'buelita. Entonces. Hasta. Bai...
Bai mi amor. Que cuidas bien mis bisnietos.

Amen. Goodbye.

or well... goodbye for now at least