The Day I Stopped Being Adorable

09 Jul 2016

The Day I Stopped Being Adorable by Terri Carrion

I stuff my cheeks with soft, buttered Cuban bread, sip Tang and ask my mother about my dimples. I’m seven and curious, but mainly fed up with strange gringas pinching my face and shrieking, “Oh, how adorable!” Particularly Mrs. Hobbs, who boards the bus at Seville Street on the way to St. Mathias for mass, reeking of Jean Nate body splash and dressed in too much powder blue.

My mother clears the table and tells me my dimples are marks left by the steel forceps, giant tweezers, the doctor used to yank me out of the womb.

Later that morning, when the bus reaches Seville Street, I sit up tall in my seat and smile. Mrs. Hobbs wobbles down the aisle, blue pleated skirt diffusing the morning light, her cold arthritic hands slowly reach out for me, fingers uncurling, her face bloated with delight. I stand up and announce that my “adorable” dimples are dents from delivery, scars of birth, “I was plucked out of the womb like a splinter.”

Mrs. Hobbs gasps, looks at my mother who sits beside me, clutching her purse, not understanding a word of this English. She backs away from us, zigzags and bumps into arm rests then drops into a seat near the front of the bus and never says another word to us. Ever.

Years later, in Teen Magazine, I read that dimples are fatty deposits, something like “cellulite of the face.”

About Terri Carrion

Terri Carrión was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and Cuban father. She grew up in Los Angeles where she spent her youth skateboarding and slam-dancing. Terri Carrión earned her MFA at Florida International University in Miami.

Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction has been published in many print magazines as well as online, including The Cream City Review, Hanging Loose, Pearl, Penumbra, Exquisite Corpse, and Dead Drunk Dublin among others. Her chapbook “Lazy Tongue” was published by D Press in the summer of 2007.

Her poems have been translated into Italian, Spanish and Arabic and have been published in international anthologies, most recently in Nuova Antologia di Poesia Americana (New Anthology of American Literature), (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, Italy 2015).

Currently she is assistant editor and art designer for Bigbridge.org, an online literary and arts magazine and co-founder of the global movement 100 Thousand Poets for Change.