Woman Hollering Creek

Ixchel, the first-person narrator, recounts her meeting with a man who goes by different names. To the narrator, he is Chaq Uxmal Paloquin, or Chaq for short, or Boy Baby, which is what he tells Ixchel his name means in Mayan. Ixchel and Boy Baby meet one day when she is working at the family pushcart, selling fruits and vegetables. It was not her day to be working and her abuelita blames her Uncle Lalo, whose designated shift it really was, for much of the trouble that follows.

Boy Baby takes Ixchel back to the room he rents, a single dirty room behind the auto repair station, and shows her his extensive collection of guns. He tells her elaborate, emotional stories about his family lineage. He claims to be a great and mighty heir to the Mayan throne and informs Ixchel that as a child he was taken to a dark temple ruin where he swore to work to restore Mayan culture. He weeps and promises to make her his queen. On his dirty, newspaper-strewn bed, Boy Baby, a grown man, takes the virginity of Ixchel, who is still in the eighth grade.

Ixchel only realizes after she is home again that she left the family pushcart outside Boy Baby’s rented room.