She never grew anything. She didn’t even try. Didn’t till the soil, didn’t fold in the manure with an old metal shovel, didn’t plant or weed or sit outside in the early morning with a cup of tea to chat with the seedlings. It was a stupid idea. It wasn’t a big deal.

The snowfall broke records that winter, like the year before that and all the years stretching back that she could remember. If there were ever a year it didn’t snow more than the one prior, she’d never heard about it. She didn’t know what was worse: the cold or the fact that it didn’t bother her anymore.

“You must be freezing! It’s that island blood,” people always joked. They’d add a little shimmy sometimes, a flourish of the hands. They may have been impersonating the Chiquita woman, from the bananas. They looked spastic.

She’d laugh. She knew her place, if not on the globe then at least in these conversations.

“That’s why you’re such a good dancer!” She was a terrible, clumsy dancer.

“We went to San Juan over spring break. The food was amazing! The beaches!” The look on their faces when she told them she’d never been. “Well,” they’d say, rabid, “You have to go. You just have to go.”

There was a memory from her first pregnancy. She’d had contractions, too early. Her mother drove her to the hospital. They turned out to be nothing, false labor, Braxton Hicks. She was dehydrated. Afterward they took a watermelon and some sparkling waters to the lake. She walked barefoot on the pebbly sand.

“Bébelo,” her mother said, nudging a water against her mouth. She took small sips. She was horrified. If labor hurt that much when it was false…

“Estás bien,” her mother said. And, to the baby inside, “Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.” Her mother lived long enough to meet the first baby, but not the second. Stomach cancer took her quickly, las colitas de rana be damned.

She had her children relatively young, at a time when everyone she knew seemed to be holding off on reproducing. The first one was part accident, part excuse to get married. The second one, if she was being honest, was because her mother was dead, and she needed something to take hold of her before she sunk. It didn’t work that way.

Her husband worked and she became the ama de casa. Her older child was two years old and moved like a pinball from room to room. The baby was six months. She’d send her husband videos all day when the toddler started screaming semi-coherent phrases. Her own voice was always in the background; her coaxing and cooing sounded disingenuous, but maybe only to her.

“Why don’t you speak Spanish at home?” her husband asked.

“Who am I going to talk to?” She gestured toward the kids.

“They can’t speak.” That was the end of that conversation. The kids would be monolingual. It wasn’t a big deal.

Sometimes, though, when they fell or stubbed their toes or cried for no good reason she’d sing. Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.

She’d never admit this to anyone, but her favorite kind of porn had always been the over-the-top, secret, incest porn, usually step-siblings or a stepparent enjoying a clandestine fuck while another family member innocently puttered in the kitchen or folded laundry in the background, completely unaware of the two figures gyrating under a throw blanket on the couch or grinding under the sheets in the master bedroom. She liked the women because their bodies were waif-like, their breasts tiny and their stomachs flat, so different from her own postpartum paunch. She liked the men because they played clueless but weren’t; they pretended to be shocked when the petite women seduced them, but the massive boners in their sweatpants told a different story.

After her second baby was born, she found out she could watch porn on her phone. She’d hold the phone in one hand, transfixed by hard cocks and firm breasts, while spoon feeding her toddler. She leaned the phone against a plastic T-Rex while playing cars with the toddler. He liked to make them fly and crash into each other midair. She’d make the sounds of explosions with her mouth.

She’d go on like this all morning until nap hour, by which time she’d worked herself into such a state that she laid the kids down hastily, nearly stumbled over the cord of the white noise machine on her way to turn off the lights. She knew her urgency was palpable; it came off her like a stink and it made the kids anxious. They never went down easily for their naps. They cried as she left the room and shut the door behind her, as she practically ran to the bedroom and unearthed her vibrator from the closet, and while she used it on herself for all of thirty seconds before she gasped and climaxed.

Afterward she’d go back to the children. They’d only been alone for a minute, but their little faces would be red and tear-streaked, their little voices hoarse. She’d gather them and sit in the rocking chair with them on her lap. She’d sing and coo until they fell into an uneasy asleep, their little tense bodies finally slackening in her arms. Sana, sana, colita de rana. She never felt like a worse mother than in the moments after she orgasmed to incest porn, when, like a guilt-ridden, hateful creature, she tried to put her babies to bed.

The idea to start a garden came to her at the library. Some days she’d bring the children there. They had story time. The kids were too young for it, but they mostly stayed quiet if a bit fidgety. It felt good to be around other mothers. She could feel their storming. She loved their placid faces.

Just inside the front door they had a book display with a rotating theme. They’d just changed it to books about spring, flowers, and gardens. There was one book whose cover was lush and green with glossy images of dirt-covered beets and dripping lilacs. The pictures inside were close-ups of rough, cracked hands dipping into damp loam, beads of fresh water accumulating on hairy stems, early morning light dusting a vine-laden trellis. She checked it out.

There was a memory from her childhood. Many of them, actually. Her mother’s rough, cracked hands dipping into damp loam. Her mother tilled the soil, folded in the manure with an old metal shovel, planted and weeded, and sat outside in the early morning with a cup of tea to chat with the seedlings. Those seedlings most certainly learned Spanish.

That evening she greeted her husband with a smile and a pizza. The kids sat in their highchairs in front of the television, placated with bright, loud, garbage media.

“What’s all that in the garage?” her husband asked. There was a modest pile of 2x4s, a new drill and driver still in the box, a package of screws, a spool of chicken wire, some metal stakes, many bags of soil and half as many of composted manure, a trowel, a shrub rake, a new metal shovel, a pair of thick gloves with leather palms, and a paper bag full of seed packets. She’d spent hundreds of dollars, blindly, ravenously. There were red welts on her forearms from unloading everything from the SUV into the garage.

“It’s for the garden.”

“We don’t have a garden.”

“We don’t have a garden yet.”

Weeks passed. Winter was stubborn. Clouds would not break; the sky held firm in its dull, mocking white. Out her windows birds circled in on her. Snow clung to the sides of the road, and the place she’d envisioned for her garden was still buried. She could wait. Nothing bothered her. Nothing made much difference to her at all.

In the meantime, she stuck to her routine. Stepbrother finds sister’s BDSM toys and learns she’s a freak! Sexy tutor crams tight teen during ACT prep. Surprise anal with dad. The anniversary of her mother’s death came and went unremarked. She spoke to no one all day. Her vibrator batteries ran out of juice and she replaced them.

It was an empty time. She felt loss acutely but did nothing about it. Even the snowmelt was like something important leaving her— maybe an excuse to keep wallowing indoors, silently floating from day to day, masturbating in isolation. Or the loss was the Spanish she still dreamed in, a word of which her children would likely never utter. Or the memory of her mother’s face, her smell, her voice, which trickled from her consciousness daily. Or her sex life, which had become an entirely solo affair, one shrouded in taboo and shame. So much was disappearing, and only because she did nothing to make it stay. She wasn’t sure if there was anything she could do.

She resolved to seduce her husband.

At bedtime she emerged from the bathroom in a loose-fitting sports bra and a pair of his boxers, the closest thing she had to lingerie. She stood at the foot of the bed for several moments waiting for some acknowledgment until the cold got to her and she shivered her way under the covers.

She wasn’t sure what to do with her body, her stomach and legs soft and hanging like spent leather. The kids were both still nursing. Her nipples chafed on everything she wore, but at least they were perky. She felt silly turning toward her husband and trying to intertwine her leg with his when he was oblivious to any twining-related efforts. She stroked his chest hair. This, at least, elicited a glance from him, and she seized her moment.

“Do you think we should…” she started and then faltered. What was the word for it? Certainly not make love—she had no interest in that at all. Sleep together? Too literal. Have sex? Too explicit; she didn’t want to scare him off, or herself. She decided on a word that she almost never used.

“…fuck?”

His entire body tensed, and she thought she’d made a mistake. He found his bookmark and tucked it away, then set his novel on the bedside table.

“Sure. Yeah. Okay.”

Something in his tone made her realize that he’d been thinking about this, and wanting it, for a long time. She hadn’t considered this; her sexual apathy for anything outside the screen of her phone had run so deep that she assumed he felt the same. She never dreamed he’d been looking at her this whole time, noticing her, and desiring her. She was a little bit embarrassed, mostly for him.

Still, she grabbed his arms and pulled him to her and he shook with wanting. She kissed him and then pulled away. He still shook and wanted. They were both propped on their elbows and she pushed him lightly now, so that he fell back onto the pillows. He looked up at her with such incredulity and longing that she almost laughed out loud, but managed to stifle it into a smile, which he returned, his eyes a little wild, the whole of him vibrating. And then she got on top of him.

A muffled sound came from the baby monitor, and before she could think she shut it off. It fell from the bedside table. He looked at it, worried, and she kissed him so she wouldn’t have to see his face.

It took some time for him to get an erection. She worked at it with her hands and mouth. She grew frustrated; it was not like in the videos. Maybe he could sense the urgency coming off her, like the frequencies that keep her children from falling asleep when she’s near. Everything she touches is imbued with uncertainty and discomfort.

Maybe he didn’t notice, because he seemed to enjoy it when he was finally hard enough for her to straddle him and slip him inside her. He breathed in her ear as she worked. She was too dry to feel much, but that didn’t seem to be a problem for him. She licked her fingers and rubbed her saliva all over, but it didn’t last. She did this again and again. It was very distracting.

He flipped her over so that he was on top and her face was pressed into the pillow. Her leg started to fall asleep. She made no noise at all while he grunted and gasped his way to the end.

When he came inside her she wanted to vomit.

He kissed her deeply, then, and told her he loved her. Something was welling inside her and she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t release something she didn’t know the shape of. The thought of becoming pregnant again flashed through her mind, and this was just funny enough for her to return his words with a genuine smile. Whatever. So it wasn’t like porn. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was sex with her husband; it wasn’t a big deal.

Time staggered on, the remaining snow piles sloughed themselves off into nothing, and the world warmed to greens, pinks, and yellows. The backyard remained uncultivated. The wood, the dirt, the seeds, the hose head, all of it stayed exactly where she put it in the middle of winter.

Summer humidity made itself cozy in the dank garage. The seeds she bought dried out and spoiled. The manure started to stink and her husband got rid of it without a fuss. The hose head surreptitiously went missing, as did the trowel and the chicken wire. No one noticed their absence. The children grew. They had her mother’s mouth but otherwise looked exactly like her husband. She told them about their abuelita. They had trouble pronouncing her name.