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started to touch me. I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t. I had already said yes. Such a simple word, almost a hiss. I wanted to say I was too tired, too…something, but I didn’t dare, not now. I let him take my panties off, and I let him enter me bare, without a rubber, for the first time.
    â€œI love you,” he was saying, as he rocked on top of me. I thought about all those nights Roy and I tried to make a child, all those nights he came in me again and again. And I thought of the bread rising in the kitchen, rising over the lip of the crockery bowl, huge, and then Lenny kissed me and I tasted smoke and beer in his mustache and I thought The smell of coffee and sunlight. The quiet music of the sparrows. Torremolinos .
    And suddenly I felt bloated, not with child, but with clay , and I saw myself lying there, on the banks of the beautiful Ohio, my mouth and hands smeared with clay. I shut my eyes on that vision, and Lenny arched over me, holding himself at arms’ length above me, and moved in me faster and faster until finally he came. “Oh,” he said then, and it could have been a word in a foreign language: I didn’t know what it meant, whether happiness or discovery or pain or surprise. And then he lowered his weight down on me.

T HE B IGS
    I am a baseball player. I come here from the Dominican Republic the home of Juan Marichal because baseball can’t make you the same much of money in the Dominican League. That is why I live in the U S of A and play baseball for the Arkansas Travelers which are a team in the Texas League but live in Arkansas. The Arkansas Travelers are a team which is called a Double A team, meaning not so good as Triple A or Major Leagues—what everybody call The Bigs. Everybody here want to make it to The Bigs. There is no Bigs in the Dominican Republic and that is why I am living here so miserable and now that my family leave me I am more miserable ever than before. The only time I smile is after when I win a big game or if I forget for some minute and think my little Angelita is waiting at home for me to kiss her for goodnight. But tonight I am more miserable than I think a dead man because Coach he suspend me off the team and all because they leave me.
    I love baseball. I love to pitch the ball. When I am the pitcher everybody depend of me, if I just stand there and hold the ball nobody do nothing. When I throw the ball everything happen. It is a good feeling but not the same as love which is something I have too much of I think. My heart it feel like it is in shreds each time when I think about Angelita and her black braids. And Pilar. I can not even say her name now without wanting to cry. Pilar is so beautiful, sometimes when I was in her I could not breathe right. When I think about her gone and Angelita with her I want to be on the mound throwing hard like Juan Marichal who come from Santo Domingo the same like me. I am a starter so I pitch the ball each four days, no more, and the rest of the time it go by so slow. I want I could pitch the ball each night if I will not tear my shoulder which is what I do at St. Peterburg my year of being a rookie when I try to show off I have stuff. Now my shoulder it hurt when I think about Pilar and Angelita so I try not to think about them when I am pitching the ball. But most of the time it is of no use because I think about them anyway. That is why I get in such big trouble tonight, I think of them when I should be thinking curve ball or slider, down or up.
    The nights they are the most bad. I have dreams. Jackie say I grind my teeth when my dreams get so bad and when I wake up I am all wet with sweating and scared. Jackie try to make me all right then but it never work. She hug me and kiss me and say it only is a dream. Then I tell her what I dream and she say what it mean like a curandera . Some times I dream Pilar is opening her legs for Antonio who was sent back to Santo Domingo for weak field and no hit.