From the archives: Sounds of Silence

For the rest of the summer, we will be highlighting pieces from the carte blanche archives.Here is Sounds of Silence by Nanette Rayman Rivera from Issue 8.Hello darkness my old friend,I’ve come to talk to you again– Simon and GarfunkelI watch him smiling to himself as we eat our first married meal together. McDonald’s. He has some light in his eyes now, his hair is combed back into his ponytail, and when he looks at me, his face turns a pale shade of pink. I love that in a man.I think I’ve made a mistake, I’m jittery and can’t eat except for the French fries. I married a schizophrenic with droopy brown eyes and incisor cheekbones a 5′7″ Puerto Rican man with butter lips and buttery under-biceps, a belly that I bounce on and a habit of grabbing my breasts, smiling and saying, perky boobies. Look at you, he says, taking my face into both his cracked-skin hands, where the knuckles are raw and red from sleeping in the castle. You are dewy. Your skin is even more beautiful. You’re glowing like a jack o lantern.Don’t talk to me like that, Jose, that kind of talk won’t change what you did. What he did was not tell me. Not really or fully or what’s true. Wouldn’t tell me when he left his life behind.He’s crying. Right there in McDonald’s, loud sobs blending in with the loud gangs of kids that should be in school, with the single mothers and their triple strollers.Click here to read the rest of the story.